Video editing

Video editors are beyond me, too complex, anybody know of a free and friendly one?

I run XP on a Pentium3 dual core Xeon with a GeForce 9500GT and have a USB2 EZ-Grabber to convert my VCR's VHS tapes into DVD-quality on my hard drive for later burning to DVD to play on my tv. They arrive as MPEG and 90 mins of VHS-tape occupy about 5 GB which reconfigures onto DVD disc nicely. Properties however do not inform as to what flavour of MPEG....

My graphics card comes with ULead editor, horrendously unfriendly and far too many bells&whistles. I only really want to top&tail, cut out adverts, chop off lengthy credits in the interests of lowering the file size.

I have tried VideoPad, Jump Cut, Virtual Dub, Wax, Zwei-Stein, Jahshaka --- and Windows Movie Marker which does not seem to handle MPEG but (only) avi

Not saying the above don't work, it is my brains that fail to function. Need something easier, and free since ULead was enough expense even though bundled with graphics PCI card. Can anybody suggest? Yours "Dualcore"

Me dim as a Toc-H lamp

I can't give you an answer but sympathise with your problem. To just chop an overrun of recording off seems to require a full rewrite to disc of the entire shenanigans!

Meldrew

The most intuitive editor that I've come across is Pinnacle Studio. A non computer savvy friend of mine had his first movie edited and burned within hours of installing Studio 9. This movie was a 60's cine film converted by filming the screen with his digicam, loading it into S9, editing out the unwanted bits and then adding titles, music and sound effects etc. The end result looked excellent to me.

Studio is far from free but he sourced his copy second hand from Amazon or similar at a reasonable price.

I have used various versions of Studio, not 9, but at around v7 ditched it in favour of Adobe Premier Elements. Studio was OK for smallish files, but did not handle larger files with stability. Elements is not free, but it's not too expensive either. The frustration of spending hours editing, then finding the application become unresponsive was too much.

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There's no such problem with Studio 9 on a suitably specced machine.

In reply to a post by the_callant:

I have used various versions of Studio, not 9, but at around v7 ditched it in favour of Adobe Premier Elements. Studio was OK for smallish files, but did not handle larger files with stability. Elements is not free, but it's not too expensive either. The frustration of spending hours editing, then finding the application become unresponsive was too much.

Same for me. Random, inexplicable crashes nearly drove me round the twist. It wasn't all bad though, on some machines Pinnacle Studio 8 was absolutely fine but it was totally unpredictable on others. I've never had any issues at all with Premiere Elements.

Well thanks re Pinnacle. I downloaded the 1400MB 15-day v12 trial that took much time. Then started to explore Pinnacle. Whether or not it is user-friendly I never discovered because it advised me on early attempts that it cannot handle MPEG or avi formats. Dare say Prism would convert but it seemd a big offput at the very start. I uninstalled Pinnacle & am now back at the drawingboard. Suggestions welcome, yrs etc "Dualcore"

Me dim as a Toc-H lamp

All current video editing packages aimed at consumers will handle MPEG2 and MPEG4 sources these days, so you're not stuck for choice. I've used everything in the courser of my work (I review for magazines and I run the website simplydv.co.uk). Have a look at MAGIX Edit Pro 15 or even Adobe Premiere Elements 7. All have trial doenloads. Failing that, there's the freebie from Pinnacle called VideoSpin (videospin.com) which is designed for simple editing of standard def and high def clips. It's pretty good - considering the price!

In reply to a post by Dualcore:

Well thanks re Pinnacle. I downloaded the 1400MB 15-day v12 trial that took much time. Then started to explore Pinnacle. Whether or not it is user-friendly I never discovered because it advised me on early attempts that it cannot handle MPEG or avi formats. Dare say Prism would convert but it seemd a big offput at the very start. I uninstalled Pinnacle & am now back at the drawingboard. Suggestions welcome, yrs etc "Dualcore"

Studio9 most certainly can handle MPEG and at least most AVI formats. I suspect that you need to RTFM.