Movie Editing

[Julie18nz]

Hi :)

I am looking at trying to shoot some vids, hopefully before Christmas, and was wondering if anyone here could help me. I need to know the name of some good editing software. I currently just use Windows Movie Maker, but want to be able to make files that can be played from VCDs in either WMV or DivX formats and Movie Maker doesnt have this option :( Any help would be very much appreciated :)

Julie.

[SavoirFaire]

I've heard Adobe Premier is good for this... or just try converting to mpeg4.

[Magnum]

Certainly I can help. You say you need a volunteer to kick? Let me know when and where and what I should have on. :D




Hi :)

I am looking at trying to shoot some vids, hopefully before Christmas, and was wondering if anyone here could help me.
Julie.

[justsomeguy]

Julie,

While Adobe Premiere is one of the better video editing packages available for the PC, it's *quite* expensive. A much better bang for your buck, IMHO, is PureMotion's EditStudio.

It comes in both a "Home" and a "Pro" version, but is very full-featured for the money.

You can check it out at:

http://www.puremotion.com/

You can also get a trial version there.

HTH,

just~

[David_B]

Hello Julie,

Power Director 4 has the option to save in Divx format, as well as wmv.

If you go to www.divx.com and click the "software" link, you get a list of different software that works with divx format, including movie editors, DVD/VCD makers. This may give you some more options.

David B.
--
http://www.ballbustinggoddess.com/Samples/Updates.html

[toughtony]

Julie, I have used most of them being a video guy. Pinnacle's commotion which was recently bought by avid is popular. premiere pro has everything you would need as well. Then there are lower budget ones like pinnacle studio and literally dozens of others. believe it or not I do my quick and dirty cuts in windows movie maker. save the file in movie maker in uncompressed format and you can use programs like sorrenson squeeze and discreet cleaner to produce your final formats. even the good cd/dvd creator programs like Nero 6 rom can create video cd's. video cd's in the u.s. are touch and go as far as a universal distribution media. if you simply encode to windows media 9 using movie maker and put the file on a cd you would likely cover the most users. perhaps dvd burning might be the best bet. let me know if you have any specific questions, I would be happy to pass on any info I know. Tony.

[smackMyNuts]

My advice would be to stick with Windows Movie Maker, but find another program to reencode its output to different forms. I know that there are free programs which do this for OS X and Linux, but I don't have a Windows box, so I haven't investigated it, but I'd be very surprised if you can't find some free video compression software. Going to a different video editting program will likely mean a more cluttered interface and a large number of extra features that you don't need and may get in the way.

I do want to add, though, that your request doesn't make any sense. VCD is a specific format which uses MPEG-1 encoding, not DivX or WMV. SVCD uses MPEG-2. There are some players which can play data CDs with DivX or WMV files on them, but that isn't going to require any special formatting from the video editting program. Instead for those you just make an ordinary data CD with the files you want to play on it.

Smack

[nutslave]

two answer julies question i started playing around with home made movies a little bit in a past couple of days and i have been using roxios easy media creator suite. the have what is called a DVD Builder and they give you options to either create actual DVDs, VCDs, Super VCDs, or DVD on CD and you simply select wich one you want to do and then once you do that you can select you movie clips and you can start adding them to the project. as for divx i haven't tried playing around with that yet.

my second part isn't ballbusting related but since it is a movie thread i though i would ask here.

i'm trying to edit a video for a couple in their late 50's that they made on their vacation part of if was shot sideways, there were some scenery that was very high like pillars so they fliped the cam sideways. any body knows how to rotate that 90 degrees or if its even possible to do that.

i have tried looking through windows movie maker and videowave 7 help files but i couldn't see anything related to rotating the actual video.

would this be a feature that would be available in the more expensive products like adobe premier or is this something that can be done in windows movie maker and i just didn't look hard enough.

i'll do some more exploring on google and thank you in advance for any help you guys can provide.

nutslave

[Tamakeri]

There are freeware utilities that will rotate a video clip. Virtualdub will do that with some formats, but it won't touch wmv. If you encode it into mpeg-1 I'm sure virtualdub will rotate it for you. Remember that the picture isn't square so you are going to get reduced size with black bars on the side or it will end up larger and extra height will get cropped out.

Yes, Adobe Premiere Pro has clip scale and rotation built in.

[Trouble]

i'm trying to edit a video for a couple in their late 50's that they made on their vacation part of if was shot sideways, there were some scenery that was very high like pillars so they fliped the cam sideways. any body knows how to rotate that 90 degrees or if its even possible to do that.

Yeah! For each pixel, the current x-coordinate and y-coordinate (x1,y1) wind up at a new location (x2, y2), using:

x2 = sin(angle)x1 + sin(angle)y1
y2 = sin(angle)y1 - cos(angle)x1

I wrote a graphics editor and that equation took me forever to find; for rotating a film, decode each frame, rotate, then re-encode, of course. Because, as Tamakeri points out, the image is not square, you may want to add a scaling troutine (probably not scaling to the full sides, because then everything wll be distorted, but scaling just a wee bit so as to diminish the cropping effect).

The editing software you see out there does not include this kind of thing because schools do not teach the basics of math that computer progreammers need to know before they start cutting their teeth on writing software.

Your original question puzzled me, as well as some others. I'd put it like this:"Oh, Julie, ye who are the sexiest, goddessest, cutest, ballbustingest woman in New Zealand, wherefore do ye oil with divx?" But that's just the way I think; I'm careful to avoid talking like that.

[smackMyNuts]

Equations for rotation are taught in every computer graphics and multimedia programming course I'm aware of. Which is how, I, as someone who has worked as a computer programmer in the past, know that you got them wrong in this post. The standard equations derived from the rotation matrix are x2 = x1cos(t)+y1sin(t) and y2 = y1cos(t)-x1sin(t). Of course, all of this is assuming that the center of the picture is at 0,0, so you'd need to shift the picture before and afterwards. Trouble's formula might be the correct inverse formula (once you switch the two sines in the first equation for one sine and one cosine) which is actually what one would need if one was writing a plug-in to do the transformation. In this case, though, you don't really need the formula, per se, since it can be simplified for the 90 or 270 degree case since we know the values of sine and cosine. So it's actually either x2=y1, y2=-x1 or x2=-y1, y2=x1 depending on whether the picture needs to be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise respectively. With the origin at the upper left instead of the middle, as I mentioned earlier, you'd need to do some shifting, so quantities of width/2 and height/2 will also need to be added in, but I'm not going to get into the specifics since my main point was just to say that Trouble was wrong.

The actual reason that this feature does not commonly appear is just that adding features costs money, so they only add as many features to a given product as they think that there's serious demand for. This is why every photo editting product in the world has rotate since people turn still cameras sidewise all the time, but less video editting products do since most people don't turn video camera sidewise. It's all a question of the demand in the market and whether or not people would be willing to pay for a given feature.

In the Mac world, there are iMovie plug-ins which do rotations. In the Linux world, there are free, open-source video editting tools which are sufficiently powerful to do that and a lot more. In the Windows world, it sounds like Tamakeri knows, but I don't.

Smack

[jeenie123]

Hey Smak, looks like you know what you're talking about when it comes to computers. I have a question for you; Do you know if it's possible to record or store Streaming Audio? There's sometimes some good BB clips aropund using this format.

[smackMyNuts]

http://all-streaming-media.com/record-video-stream/all-streaming-video-recording-software.htm

Smack

[jeenie123]

Many thanks for your prompt reply,

kind regards.

[Troubled]

Yeah! For each pixel, the current x-coordinate and y-coordinate (x1,y1) wind up at a new location (x2, y2), using:

x2 = sin(angle)x1 + sin(angle)y1
y2 = sin(angle)y1 - cos(angle)x1

Equations for rotation are taught in every computer graphics and multimedia programming course I'm aware of. Which is how, I, as someone who has worked as a computer programmer in the past, know that you got them wrong in this post. The standard equations derived from the rotation matrix are x2 = x1cos(t)+y1sin(t) and y2 = y1cos(t)-x1sin(t). Of course, all of this is assuming that the center of the picture is at 0,0, so you'd need to shift the picture before and afterwards. Trouble's formula might be the correct inverse formula (once you switch the two sines in the first equation for one sine and one cosine) which is actually what one would need if one was writing a plug-in to do the transformation. In this case, though, you don't really need the formula, per se, since it can be simplified for the 90 or 270 degree case since we know the values of sine and cosine. So it's actually either x2=y1, y2=-x1 or x2=-y1, y2=x1 depending on whether the picture needs to be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise respectively. With the origin at the upper left instead of the middle, as I mentioned earlier, you'd need to do some shifting, so quantities of width/2 and height/2 will also need to be added in, but I'm not going to get into the specifics since my main point was just to say that Trouble was wrong. Yep, that Troubled fellow is (partly) wrong again. You beat me to it Smack :ibow4u: You can rotate even if the picture is off centre but I don’t really have all access to all the right mathematical functions here. However, there is a really easy way to do this too. I find that rotating the monitor by the required angle works a treat :weryfun

[Trouble]

...but I'm not going to get into the specifics since my main point was just to say that Trouble was wrong.
I was close enough; the answers that one can use "x program which is free from some website" and "I use y program which will do rotations but doesn't support those formats" are wrong; it is irrelevant what other people's software does or does not do since it is easily possible to make one's own.

The rotation algorithm I have written down somewhere; from memory, I came close, and any programmer would have noted that it was slighly off and adjusted. The point being that we need not put up with CrudWare's latest verson of CrudVideo; a compiler and the filespec, with a book on basic math, provides everything needed.

Adding rotational algorithms to graphics and video software is a failure to program well; the cost is miniscule and the size of the object code is miniscule. There is no excuse for forgetting something so basic.

With the 90/270 degree rotation, you do not need both, only one: if you can rotate left and the image winds up upside-down, you flip the image rightside-up -- unless CrudWare forgot to put in THAT function, also.

Thanks for pointing out the correct equation.

[Trouble]

Yep, that Troubled fellow is (partly) wrong again. You beat me to it Smack :ibow4u: You can rotate even if the picture is off centre but I don’t really have all access to all the right mathematical functions here. However, there is a really easy way to do this too. I find that rotating the monitor by the required angle works a treat :weryfun
Ouch. Crawlin' out the woodwork, they is. JUST because I don't like to do graphics programming, now I get to live down the rest of my days as "that guy who misunderestimated the rotate equation". For off-centre images, Troubled, I'm not sure what you mean; since we are working in digital media, we can make any point the origin point for the purpose of rotating the image; if the image is not as wide as it is tall, then you'll either have to crop or scale after rotating. If CrudVideo doesn't have either cropping OR scaling, then you need to ditch CrudWare. Seriously.