 Computerworld is New Zealand's only specialised information systems fortnightly.
Subscribe now for $97.50 (24 issues) and save more than 37% off the cover price!
 Get the latest news from Computerworld delivered via email.
Sign up now
 Subscribe to Computerworld's
RSS newsfeed here and get news stories as they break.
Shooting footage with a video camera is easy. Assembling the random footage into something watchable can be a whole other matter. Working with professional-level video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro can cost a good deal and also means a very steep learning curve.
If you only want to do occasional editing for YouTube videos, there are some inexpensive applications available, such as Adobe Premiere Elements (US$80), Pinnacle Studio HD ($50) and Sony Movie Studio HD ($40). But if you're really strapped for cash, there are a number of free tools out there that can do the job quite nicely.
For this roundup, I looked at the Windows versions of three free desktop programs (Avidemux, Wax and Windows Live Movie Maker) and at a web-based editor (JayCut).
To test them, I shot footage of some friends at a golf driving range with a relatively low-end, inexpensive camcorder, the Canon ZR800. The ZR800 records in the MiniDV video file format, which typically produces a file of approximately 220MB for one minute of video with a resolution of 640-by-480 pixels.
I then edited these clips using the tools that each of the four applications supplied. Rather than trying to create four identical videos, I edited each according to what I perceived were the strengths of the product I was using.
Avidemux 2.5.2
Originally a Linux-only program, Avidemux has been ported to Windows and Mac OS X. This desktop program easily and quickly installed from a self-extracting executable file.
The user interface is pretty much what you'd expect to see in a basic video editor: A timeline that runs along the bottom can be used to move a playback indicator forward and back through your video clip; a window in the upper-right shows you the moment in your clip to which the playback indicator on the timeline is set. The size of this window can be adjusted, and a second window can be added that shows what your footage will look like when a visual adjustment or effect is added to it.
Avidemux does video editing in a strictly linear way. You load your first clip; then you load the next clip, which Avidemux will attach only to the end of the previously loaded clip. You cannot insert a clip somewhere between the beginning and end points of another clip.
|
