Pinnacle
My Personal Choice for Video Editing
Over the last 25 years of more, one of my favourite hobbies has been videography. I just love the way that a day out or holiday can be brought back to life watching the life-like qualities of a home movie. Even though I aspire to the television-like quality of the my completed "masterpieces", there is still that something that tells the viewer that it is a home movie and I would always like to keep it that way.
I used to own two Panaosonic edit-decks, a primitive Amiga 1200 computer and lots of other bulky gadgets to play around with my movies, but being a home-user, they were far from practical having to set them up on the dining table every time I wanted to do my video work. Then one day, I bought a PC because Amiga were ceasing production. As the PC video techonology evolved, so I too, upgraded and I've just got to say, that I found Pinnacle by far the most stable and easy-to-use video-editing software aimed at the home user. Many others programs I tried, would work fine and then right when I was in the middle of something, would freeze and crash. Others that were more stable often had other problems like the final video would go out of sinc with voices - which was quite irritating, especially on some of my karioke shots! But there were none of these problems with Pinnacle. For most of the time, it would run smoothly and easily. It was only when I tried to edit a huge movie, that it would get a little slow, but most of my home movies, are up to an hour in length and I get no problems at all. With all video editing, I would recommend regular saving as you work - every 10 minutes or so, I just press Ctrl and S on the keyboard.
One important thing before you start video editing.... I would recommend the highest processor you can afford (I currently run a Pentium 4- 3GHZ with 1GB of memory, and find that Pinnacle is a joy to use). My version is 9.3 but version 10 is now available with more powerful tools, of which soon, I will no doubt be upgrading to.
The Pinnacle Studio is a consumer-level, video editing software with which you can connect your camcorder to your computer. I connect mine via firewire, open the program, click on the "Capture" tab and it will capture the movie to where you wish on the hard drive, automatically splitting it up into shots. My camcorder is a Sony that has an iLink that most modern camcorders have. Connection is detected by Pinnacle and when you click "Capture" the program starts receiving data from the camcorder. Because of the iLink, Pinnacle divides the video into "chapters" of when I started and ended each shot. I find this great because, in my early days, I had to sit and watch, start and stop my camcorder to separate all the scenes that had been recorded which used to take hours.
Once the movie is captured, you then move to the "Edit" section of the program via a tab at the top of the window where you can chop and change your shots, add transitions of which there are standard fade-in/fade out, a large variety of wipes and fades, and special effect transitions (FX) and then there's a long list of other (optional) transitions you can purchase.
When you are satisfied and finished all your editing, you then select the "Make Movie" tab where you can render back to tape (if your camcorder's connection has this facility), make an MPEG or AVI, (AVI files are larger than MPEG files, but AVIs can be played back on a wider range of computers). Other formats like stream and share, that I personally do not use. Once the movie is rendered, you can burn to DVD, VCD (video CD or SVCD (better quality VCD - that will burn a movie onto a ordinary CD disk that will play on most home DVD players - but check your DVD has this facility first).
With the program, comes a very comprehensive, searchable help file that should you run into difficulties, you can quickly sort it out. I can highly recommend Pinnacle Video Studio, for home-movie editing that will give truly professional results.