I can’t get my Windows Movie Maker to work… crashes all the time… can anyone recommend another program?
Final Cut Pro is the ‘industry standard’ just as Photoshop is the standard for editing images. And, yeah, it’s got a big price tag. Sounds like you’re on a PC, but iMovie is supposed to be decent, too.
I’m actually looking for something easy… maybe even that my kids could use… not movie studio or Photoshop quality.
sorry… not sure… i’m at the other end of the spectrum on this one…
You might take a look at EditStudio from PureMotion. It’s cheap and really feature rich. The learning curve’s a little steeper than the Pinnacles of the world, but it really is worth it in the long run IMHO. I know a lot of people who really like Sony Vegas as well.
Here’s a pedantic sidenote about this kind of software. Feel free to ignore. There are basically two paradigms in video editing, storyboard and timeline. The cheap stuff you get with a DVD burner, etc…, or MovieMaker primarily uses storyboarding. It’s fine at first but very quickly runs into big limitations as soon as you want more fine-grained control. Timeline-based applications are quite a bit tougher to learn, but ultimately give you the maximum flexibility and are a lot more rewarding to work with. Your kids will probably pick it up faster than you will ;P.
final cut is THE program to use if you are on a mac, if not, check out imovie (if they have a version for PC out), that is much faster to learn but still offers a good amount of options/control.
I use Pinnacle and it’s very easy to learn, mostly drag and drop capable. But it also has quite a bit of capabilities. Certainly not “studio quality” but you can still do some pretty impressive stuff with it.
~Matt
I use “Vegas” to edit and “DVD Architect” to make the DVDs. They are not very intuituve, but that may be because they are feature laden.