As a team-building exercise, my company has got us making movies. I've somehow managed to volunteer myself for the editing role.

This means that I've got to take a bunch of footage (which we're still in the process of filming) and edit it down to about 3 minutes.

First: what tips do people have for this kind of thing?
Second: what software should I use? Windows Movie Maker doesn't have enough features.

I need to take the original video, overlay voiceover, and cut back and forth between at least 2 video tracks.

I've tried Pinnacle Studio, but it's a bit flaky (I thought I'd lost 3 hours progress this morning), which doesn't inspire confidence. I also tried Magix Movie Edit Pro, but the performance doesn't appear that great, in that it can't preview AVCHD in real-time (it appears to use 2 cores to do the rendering, but I've got 4 cores, so it's missing a trick there).

iMovie 09, or iMovie HD (the 06 version) should meet your requirements if you have access to a Mac. In 09, make sure to open Preferences and tick the "Show Advanced Tools" under General. That will allow finer grained tweaking while editing.

Perhaps Adobe has a trial of Premiere Elements? On Windows, I think that's as good as you'll get (other than Premiere standard).

I despise all Pinnacle products, though that is based on my impression of them from 5-6 years ago, so I don't know...

I'd forgotten about Premiere; they do have a trial version. I think for the moment, I'll press on with Cyberlink PowerDirector, which seems to get good reviews.

Actually, all of the video-editing software I've tried crashes. Either they're all a bit crap, they don't like all being installed at the same time, or there's something wrong with my PC.

On the last one, I ran Prime95 for a couple of hours last night, and nothing went wrong, so I'm inclined to believe that it's crappy software. I'll take a look at the stack traces when they occur and see if there's a pattern.

Yeah. That way you can report it to them, and they'll do nothing about it!

Seriously, though. If there's a pattern, then it suggests a software problem. If it's completely random, then it's more likely to be hardware.

I'm not even a huge fan of Cyberlink either. PowerDVD was fine back in the day, but it's always seemed a little bloated to me and that doesn't seem to have improved.

Video editing software is the last piece of the "decent, inexpensive alternative" puzzle, IMO. There are decent cheap or free alternatives to pretty much every other type of program out there, but not video editing. I'm sure it's no easy feat, but I've been waiting for something to come along for years, and still the only thing that's come along has been stuff with Cyberlink, Pinnacle, Ulead, and other company names that instantly scare me off.

I just checked AlternativeTo.net, and there don't seem to be a whole lot of options, as I suspected. I was, however, surprised to see "VideoLAN Movie Creator." I don't have any expectations on that one, but it's free and VLC is one of my favorite applications of all time, so I'm going to give it a try...

*edit*
Ouch, looks like VLMC is a 0.1.0 release. No wonder I hadn't heard of it yet. Still, I appreciate the effort they're putting forth, and I think these are the folks to do it...

*edit 2*
Just tried it out, and just like the warning when you start it states, it's extremely pre-alpha. It really doesn't work right now. I simply tried importing several clips, dragging them to the timeline, and playing them. That made it crash hard.

Still, I'm excited for that project to get somewhere. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

To be honest, $100 falls into my definition of "inexpensive". Particularly if there's a non-crippled trial version I can have a look at first.

I'm interested to see how the VideoLAN people get on, though. I doubt they'll have anything ready to use within the two weeks I've got before my deadline.

You're right, of course. I would still like $50 for the amount of video editing I do, but $100 is definitely an improvement over Premiere Pro.


Considering VLC went into 1.0 about 4-6 months ago after years, I'd say you're right

And after a couple of weeks playing with trial versions of Adobe Premiere Elements, Cyberlink PowerDirector, Pinnacle Studio, MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, Corel VideoStudio Pro X3 and Sony Vegas, I declare the winner to be:

Sony Vegas

The others all crashed, some even while not actually doing anything. So far, Sony Vegas has done everything I've asked of it (which is, admittedly, not exactly James Cameron-level), and hasn't hiccuped once.

iMovie on the iPhone 4

I used Vegas a while ago (ok, back when I think it was version 6) and while it was 'ok', I preferred Premiere. I still use Premiere Pro and haven't looked at Vegas in quite a while. Maybe I should look at it again.

Cool, glad to hear you found one you like. I wasn't super hot on it when I tried it, but I think that, like Tim, I tried it a long time ago.

I'm curious, which version of Vegas are you using? Is it Pro or that "Movie Studio," which seems to be their "Elements" version. They seem to even have the same general pricing as Adobe.

I recently discovered that a recent-ish PS3 update added a video editor. I haven't even looked at it, but if you already have a PS3, maybe it's worth a look.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0

...and, yeah, it's priced/featured to compete with Adobe Premiere Elements and all of the others that I listed.