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Gear / Technical Help => Photo / Video Recording => Topic started by: Jeremy Lykins on April 10, 2009, 04:46:43 PM
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Is there any good free (and easy to use) video editing software out there? I'm just looking for something that I can use to sync the audio that I record to some video that I've taken with my point-and-shoot camera. The video files are .mov and I use a pc.
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I would say windows media player but I don't think you can even import .movs into it.
Super MAY be able to help you out but I tend to think it won't: http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html
for a little bit of money, I know Apple Quicktime pro can do it. I have do it with time-lapses (see link in signature for examples) and it was pretty easy. www.apple.com/quicktime
Good luck!
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I use Vegas 8 pro...you can download the trial.
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Be aware: the clips you get from *most* of the point-and-shoot cams run much faster than audio recorded at standard speed. This is especially true with Sony point-and-shoots. So you'll have to crunch the audio a bit to get it in perfect synch. If they are all short clips (say......less than a minute), you can probably get by without the audio correction.
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I don't think a 'free' video editor exists (apart from the one that comes with Windows). Do you know how much time and effort would go into making a video editor? This isn't something that a single coder could ever aim to achieve. And if they could, you can be sure it would not be 'easy to use'.
As scyue said, download the trial version of one of the Vegas products. They all have fully functional 30 day trials. It's great for syncing up new audio to an existing video. Personally, I'd fork out the $100 for Vegas Video.
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I have had some success with AVS Video Editor (http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Editor.aspx), when I was working on a PC.
Mind you, I was kind of a novice at working with video, and the app was pretty inexpensive - I think it was $30.00, or something like that.
That said, I thought it did a fine job, and was pretty intuitive. My only complaint with it was that I thought the interface was a bit clunky, especially when learning how to create my own menu. Then again, a menu isn't really the biggest deal to me, as long as I can select each individual track, I'm happy.
I looked it up again, since my license has expired, and apparently they're offering the license for their apps, two different ways:
1) a one-year license for $39.00 - I believe this gives you access to any/all of their apps
2) an unlimited use license for $59.00 - again, this seems to be for any/all of their apps
If you want to just check the app out to help you decide if you like the features or not, you can get a free demo version, which will print a little message across the screen, but is a full-featured version.
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I think windows movie maker is the easiest and free solution for you, but it can not support MOV format of course, so you need to convert your video to AVI format like what i did. =] i am using leawo free avi covnerter (http://www.leawo.com/video-converter/free-aviconverter.html)
check my blog i think it must can help you with convert video to windows movie maker (http://video-convert-decode.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-convert-videos-to-avi-for.html).
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Besides Windows Media and IMovie look at:
Zwei-Stein
http://www.thugsatbay.com/tab/?q=zweistein
Wax
http://www.debugmode.com/wax/
Blender
http://www.blender.org/
Some of the above are more compositing programs (particularly Blender) but can do some of the job.
For money AVS has some tools (and I use it for file conversions all the time) but better video editors are available including:
Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 ($69 until the end of the month)
Pinnacle Studio 14 ($50-130)
Adobe Premiere Elements 8 (Probably $150)
hope this helps.
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I don't think a 'free' video editor exists (apart from the one that comes with Windows).
Sure they do! This site lists and rates them: http://www.videohelp.com/tools
I use VirtualDub (free) for my video editing but again, it won't support .mov.
Try checking out these
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?orderby=Type&toolsearch=&convert=MOV%20to&s=&hits=50
or using other search features on that site.
But if you convert to avi then you can use VirtualDub to replace existing audio with a new audio stream. Let me know if you need help in how to do it in VDub.
Here's an old example I've done previously
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2i1RMyQo6k
I'm not sure why people are saying Windows Media Player.. pretty sure that is purely a player and not an editor.
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Avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ is quirky and doesn't do real time preview, but it can give you a lot of control over your video, and it's free. I've found the latest beta versions to be the best:
http://avidemux.razorbyte.com.au/
Avisynth is even more powerful and even more geeky. It's used by serious pros because of the tremendous power it makes available. A video editing programming language, basically.
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page
ffmpeg is the conversion boss, and stuff like SUPER and others are repackaging of the free ffmpeg. http://ffmpeg.org/
I use Avanti to run ffmpeg, I can just barely stumble through some simple conversions: http://avanti.arrozcru.com/
I've done a blog page demonstrating audio syncing with Avidemux:
http://www.homebrewedmusic.com/2009/06/10/audio-for-video-using-avidemux/
Fran
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My wife introduced me to ffmpeg a while ago, and although I can see a lot of potential in that, I'm still a bit stumped as to what choices to make when doing conversions between various formats. The missus had used it for a few simple projects, and just let the defaults take care of things, but I'm not sure that's always the way to go.
My big question when looking at that app is:
what determines which format you want to end up with, and what kind of formula does one use when converting things?
Maybe that sounds a bit vague, but I didn't want to totally derail the basic topic here. Maybe there's another thread I should be looking at? I'm open to (most) suggestions...
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ffmpeg is the conversion boss, and stuff like SUPER and others are repackaging of the free ffmpeg. http://ffmpeg.org/
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My wife introduced me to ffmpeg a while ago, and although I can see a lot of potential in that, I'm still a bit stumped as to what choices to make when doing conversions between various formats. The missus had used it for a few simple projects, and just let the defaults take care of things, but I'm not sure that's always the way to go.
My big question when looking at that app is:
what determines which format you want to end up with, and what kind of formula does one use when converting things?
Maybe that sounds a bit vague, but I didn't want to totally derail the basic topic here. Maybe there's another thread I should be looking at? I'm open to (most) suggestions...
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I'm afraid _you_ have to determine what format you want to end up with. I'm usually hoping for 720P H.264 with AAC or MP3 sound in a container like .MOV or .MP4 that is accepted readily by YouTube.
My current issue is converting ZS3 .MTS to something that PE7 can handle, and by a lot of experimenting I've wound up converting to a .MPG format using an mpeg2 codec. I'm surely losing some quality, but at least I can edit the clip.
I'm afraid digital video is a tremendously complicated area to learn about - there seem to be infinite formats with vast numbers of variations and more get added all the time.
Fran
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I use ffmpeg. It's not for the faint at heart, but it is mostly functional. There are various front ends (Lives in linux), but some things you can only do with a recent version and intimate knowledge of the inner workings.
My process I guess after about a year of fiddling. ffmpeg to extract the original audio. faad to convert it to wav. audacity to find the timestamp / sync point by lining up the wave forms. sox to extract the external audio segment of equivlent length and the adjust the speed (1.00011 for the difference between my FH1 and Korg MR-1000). ffmpeg to decode the video and pipe that to mpeg2enc (mjpegtools) for mpeg2video encoding. mplex to rejoin 720p (or DVD) video with the new audio. Like I said, not for the faint at heart. But functional.
There's only about a 1/2 of a second difference per hour between recording devices. But for drumming and such at 60p, unperfect sync is noticeable, if only to me. For clips less than 5 minutes, not so much. For talking heads, maybe I've just seen too many kung fu movies to have it bother me as much. faad to convert AAC to WAV because ffmpeg seems to shift a bit if I use it to convert and adjust the sync point. Making perfect sync a little impossible on a moving target.
Otherwise ffmpeg is capable of doing it all. I'm in linux and dvdauthor and a few other tools can be a bit more picky about things. So I've found the more reliable path, even if it's not so short or pretty.
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I have been struggling to learn this exact task recently. Video is a pain in the ass.
I used a Flip Ultra HD camera to record a show. It records .mov's in h.264 compression. Fortunately, the DAW I use for audio (Ableton Live) also handles .mov's. I dragged the .mov into a track in Ableton, then dragged the Schoeps audio into a track below it. I pan each audio track hard left/right to make the sync'ing easier. You just drag the video file along the time line until you're hearing both audio tracks at the exact same time. Select the entire length of the video, turn off the camera audio (each track has a button that turns it on or off), and export the video with the new audio. You can choose whatever format you want, but I stuck with mov since I was trying to keep any conversion to a minimum.
That part was all easy. The real bitch came in trying to get these files to DVD. I tried Vegas & Architect, but they were way more than what I needed. So I found DVD Flick, and it is perfect. Handles most anything you can throw at it, so I just dragged & dropped the .mov with the new audio to DVD Flick, and hit 'Create DVD'. It does everything else for you from there, you end up with a Video_TS file you can burn as a regular DVD. It is awesome.