Recommendations for film editing software?

[Emher]

Hey guys I'm about to start editing a movie, and thing is I've thus far used my dads Mac for it, but to make things easier I'm going to have to use my brothers Windows XP machine. Any recommendations for good video editing software for XP? I've thus far used iMovie and Final Cut of which my favorite was the latter.

 

[A beaker full of death]

This rocks. Professional level stuff. There is a learning curve.

http://www.ulead.com/msp/runme.htm

 

[Harvey]

Sony Vegas is okay, although I won't whole-heartedly recommend it. And it's not free.

AVID maybe?

 

[Bloodwhiner]

wait a minute.. you want to make video editing easier by going to Windows????

Dude, you have already lost the arguement.

 

[Chess Piece Face]

It's all going to suck tremendous balls after using Final Cut Pro, ,not to mention it will be less than professional. I'd suggest investing in a used mac. In fact, even if you weren't editing video, I'd suggest investing in a used mac.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

If all I want to do is edit out commercials. put in chapters, and make pretty menus (which I do quite often with classic films), I use TMPGEnc DVD Author. Extremely easy to use and nice results.

It's a fairly basic program, but for my purposes, it works just fine.

 

[Messianni]

Final Cut Pro is wonderful. If you're just on Windows though I've always enjoyed using Adobe Premiere (plus it works well tied into After Effects, Photoshop, Audition, EncoreDVD, etc. if you buy it in the CS suite) or Avid.

Stay away from tripe like Pinnacle Studios. It's owned by Avid now but that means nothing. It sucks.

What kind of movie are you making, out of curiosity?

 

[Emher]

First off guys, this is something I need to finish pretty quickly and at home. I won't have access to my dads Mac during that time and he only has iMovie. When I've worked with final cut it's been at a course I was at last fall at the school I'm starting full time education at next monday. I just mentioned the Mac stuff to give some examples of what I have for experience. This is going to have to be on my brothers Windows machine to give me any kinds of chance of finishing it.

Actually thanks Messianni for reminding me of Adobe Premiere, I knew I'd heard of something sort of like Final Cut for Windows and that is probably it.

The movie I'm making is a Machinima using Halo 3. We have recorded all that we need for it and just need to edit it together, get some music, a voiceover and some subtitles and the such. Also need to figure out of to get it from the 360. The plan has always been to burn the raw material onto a DVD-RW using the HDD/DVD recorder we have connected to the TV and somehow rip the video off the disc onto the computer. I'm pretty sure my cousin has something for this, but if you have any suggestions for this as well I'd be happy to hear them.

Lastly thanks for the suggestions so far!

 

[dragunzng]

If you're editing video it'll go much faster and more smoothly on a Mac, unless you've got an uber beast of a Windows machine. Even then, you're still risking the occasional crash.

It depends what kind of movie you're going to be editing and how deeply involved you plan on getting. Is it a home movie? Windows Movie Maker should suffice.

Something in between? The above mentioned Ulead should be okay, though I personally despise the interface. It's also relatively easy to learn.

If you want to produce something that looks really slick and professional, and if you plan on making a career out of editing, you might want to look at Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. Premiere offers powerful but simple editing tools, and there are tons of tutorials out there for it. After Effects can also be used for simple editing, but is used generally for 2D (and some limited 3D) post production work.

Final Cut Pro is a really powerful tool, but it'll take you a while to master, I also think it's only available on the Mac.

 

[Hermiod]

It's probably not of much use, but if you need to use a Mac have a look and see what version of iMovie your father's Mac has. If it's iMovie from iLife 08 then he might also have a copy of iMovie HD. Owners of iLife 08 can download it for free here.

Apple acknowledge that in their attempts to make the current version of iMovie more accessible they've lost a few people who preferred iMovie HD which is more powerful but a quite a bit more difficult to use. Apple (or, if you believe the Stevenote, a single Apple engineer) rewrote iMovie from scratch because that engineer couldn't use it to make a quick video of his deep sea diving holiday in 30 minutes. In addition, iMovie HD projects are incompatible with iMovie 08. So, they give away iMovie HD to anyone who owns iLife 08.

 

[Small White Car]

If it's gotta be Windows, Adobe for sure. It will be the closest thing to Final Cut that you'll be able to get.

 

[Timby]

If it's gotta be Windows, Adobe for sure. It will be the closest thing to Final Cut that you'll be able to get.

I concur. Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 is a phenomenal Windows-based editing suite, and its integration with the other components of the Creative Suite is very nice. It also boasts native export to Flash video, which is very convenient.

Otherwise, Sony Vegas and Avid Express (the full Avid suite would be overkill for you) are very solid, as well. Ultimately, when it comes to video editors, once you hit a certain price/feature point (so, the level of Vegas / Premiere Pro / Avid Express / Final Cut), it ultimately boils down to user preference. Premiere has a slightly less intuitive interface, but its titling program, derived from Photoshop's text engine, kicks the crap out of Final Cut's horribly clunky titles; Vegas has excellent audio tools (because it was originally developed as an audio editor, with the video component built later) but it lags behind Final Cut and Premiere in smoothness and quality of video transitions.

At the end of the day, though, anything that I can do in Final Cut Studio on my MacBook Pro, I can just as easily turn around and do on Adobe Premiere Pro on my Windows XP machine. Ultimately, when a video is being edited, it's not the program that matters (with some exceptions at the very low end*) -- it's the skill and the editing sensibilities of the person using the mouse and keyboard.

* If a program has Ulead or Pinnacle on the box, avoid it like the plague, as it's nothing but utter trash.

 

[JustAFriend]

Hands down: Sony Vegas Movie Studio with DVD Architect (<$90)

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudio

Been using it for more than a year and haven't found the need for anything more.

Easy to use. Cheap. No fail disks.