Home video editing on your computer

T

tbone

250+ Posts
I'm looking for feedback from anyone currently doing this. Just looking to do home movies in a somewhat watchable format - thus the desire for editing.

1) What kind of camera is needed? Is a $350 Mini dv with a firewire port ok, or do I really need to spend $600-800?

2) How much hard drive space and ram do you really need? I'm gonna be saving down to DVD for posterity. I have 512 ram and about 5 gigs left on the hard drive.

3) How big of a pain in the *** is it to actually sit down and edit clips in to a highlight clip? My Dell came with some sort of movie editor. Is this more **** that I could buy that will just be gathering dust after the first time or two?

Thanks in advance.
 
I'm using a Mac, so your mileage may vary from what mine is.

An expensive camera isn't necessary, I'm using a Canon ZR80 that I got for under $400 and I get great results. Firewire is absoutely necessary.

5 gigs is way to little, the file you product to burn a DVD is 4.7 GBs. Every hour of raw DV is about 12 GBs. As for RAM, more is always better, I have 1.3 GB and it works well. My guess for the Dell is that 512 is the bare minimum.

If the Dell program is anything like Imovie, its pretty easy and even fun to get creative with this stuff. 90 percent of the content of home movies are pretty boring, when you take a 10 minute segment and edit it down to a minute and a half of the interesting stuff, it keeps people's attention better.
 
Your camera is probably fine for what you're trying to accomplish. Three things that are much more important than the type of camera:
1. Use a tripod
2. Do not zoom in and out. It is okay to use a zoomed shot, but the constant zooming in and out point to amateur.
3. Have decent lighting. Outside shots are usually fine with no additional light, but indoor shots need more light many times.

You need more hard drive space. Most suggest a separate 60GB - 80GB drive just for your videos for performance reasons. You'll typically only store what you are working on, but if you've got a project or two, you'll certainly need more space.

The movie editor that you get with your Dell is fine. There are many out there, and they all have very similar features. They can make you look very professional in a very short period of time. Careful, though. This is an expensive hobby. I am trapped in the vortex, and can't seem to get out.
 
well how expensive let see

Another HD: 120 or 200 GB HDD...maybe around $100 - $150ish. More Ram, say another 512... $100/$130. Pro software for fancy schmancy editing? Say Adobe Premier...$700. Gettting so into it and deciding to drop $3500 on that new Dell or Mac.
smile.gif

I imagine though for the amateur home editor your mounting cost will be things such as more ram, bigger hdd, and blank dvds.
 
What about the editing software?

I downloaded the free version of Ulead Video Studio 8. That was pretty good, but I didn't love it. Any recomendations out there?
 
I could get way into this, of course reflecting on my GGW editing days.

My quickie advice:

Final Cut Pro is the **** if you can get a copy from someone. Older versions aren't that hard to come by. It's easier to master, and it can do whatever you want. You may even want to experiment with After Effects, it gets addicting.

It's too late to say this, but a Mac is better than PC for all of this.

I would really stock up on the space. You can actually fit a bunch of Dig Video onto not many Gigs, but it'll look like ****. We used to use "True one to one" and it was literally like 2 Gigs per minute of footage once we up-res'd at the end. (We had about 4 Terrabytes all full when I quit) To look decent - watchable, you'll want the space and it'll be worth it. Especailly if you're going to put them on DVD. No reason to save ****** grade video. Look into extractable or external drives. That way, you can keep them on the shelf, and not worry about constantly relocating footage.

The camera isn't that important when talking about editing. Any DV camera will do the trick. Careful with the tapes though, cheap tapes can kill you in the end. If buying a camera, shop around, you can find some nice 3 chip cameras for pretty good bargains these days.

My biggest advice with the editing, is to read the instructions, or follow along with a tutorial (I'm sure it'll have one). This will save lots of headaches and teach you a lot. Eventually, you'll be cutting your daughter's rehearsal dinner tape like a pro.

Also, for DVD making, most of the free ones are fairly standard. I used iDVD that came with the G5 and it was fine.
 
I would not get an external hard drive, especially USB. You will be transferring from you video camera to the computer using firewire. This is far faster then USB 2.0. If your hard drive can not record the info as fast as your camera transmits it, you will suffer some loss in quality from many dropped frames. Internal hard drive data transfer is faster and cheaper since there is not the added cost of the protective case and power supply.
 
First, unless you plan on keeping a lot of image files open at once, you do not need more ram. Running Premier and monitoring memory usage I seldom break 400 on RAM usage even when encoding. If you are doing your own gifs or cartoons you need much more, or maybe if you are trying to splice more than a couple pieces of video at a time. If you are going to be doing mpeg2 encoding from avi through your processor I recommend having the fastest system you can afford, since an old system may take ten hours or more to encode a single hour. I use a hardware encoder to avoid that problem, but my sources are video tapes and DVD's for the most part (Public Domain!).

I like to use TMPGEnc for basic editing and Premier for bigger projects. In either case you need an mpeg2 software encoder with it if you want to produce standard format dvd's. I need to test some new authoring programs, and I don't have one to recommend. The cheap ones don't allow you to reverse, frame advance and ultra slo-mo stuff, which is a requirement for pervs like me.

I transfer a lot of video and have four hardrives with nearly 400 GB between them. Capturing and authoring a single video starting with an mpeg2 image acheive with a hardware encoder (I recomend Hauppage WinTV-PVR250), you need about 20 GB free to author a video with chapters. It basicaly makes the copies, the original, the source separated into audio and video, and the DVD image, plus the equivalent of another DVD in free storage. If you are trying to work in AVI you need 100 mB free to do a whole movie, maybe less if you encode up front and delete the avi's after saving them. Save files on DVD-R (or +R if you like) when you aren't using them, so by a big pack of them.

I can tell you that a lot of software and hardware does not work well together, and I have spent a couple thousand dollars and many many hours working out the bugs, in order to do it right. If it is a one time deal I recommend paying a pro to do it. If it is homemade porn I still recommend a pro, just make sure it is someone you trust. If you want to get into it full time, good luck.
 
This link/site has good info that may help. Link

I have an AMD 2.2ghz, 1gig ram, use Vegas editing software and Architect DVD software. The system works great and I can do everything I want. In the future, I'd like to get more CPU power...you can never have enough when working with DV.

I must add that I have two 120gig 7200 hard drives. One is internal for programs and one is connected via firewire for my digital video.

BL
 
jcdenton,
You are thinking of firewire 400 or 1394. The new firewire standard is firewire 800.

Here are some benchmarks for hard drives with USB and firewire.
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If he is just using a 1394 camera or connection, a USB hard drive will be fine. If those items are 1394b, the USB 2.0 hard drive will be the bottleneck. An internal ATA 133 hard drive will blow any firewire or USB drive away though, especially if you run 2 of them in a raid 0 array.
 
Anybody got any suggestions on the best camcorder on the market for under a grand? I thought I was going to buy the new sony that records directly to a mini DVD, but in reading the reviews, some folks say you can hear the whining of the DVD spinning when playing back your videos. Secondly, they say the video quality is not as good as some lesser expensive models. But they say that the convienence of the "point and shoot" aspect of the camcorder as well as the convienece of just popping out the DVD and popping it into your DVD player and watching video instantly is awesome. Any feedback?
 
jcdenton,

You are correct. Looking at all the specifications, a USB 2.0 hard drive should do great. It looks like I way overbuilt my computer. I have a raid 0 array with 2 ata133 80 gig hard drives and a 1394b connection for video input that works allsome. I never lose a frame. My Sony Handycam only has a 1394a connection and that is the same for about every video camera I can find. My computer far exceeds what I can put into it. Good news is I will not have to upgrade that computer when the next generation of video cameras come out.
 
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