Camcorder & video editing for Windows!

Hi. Some of you know that I'm a photographer, but if you don't, you know now. P

Anyway, I've decided to do "behind the scenes" videos. I'm wondering if anyone knows how I would go about doing this. Obviously I need a camera, and have done some research but am unsure in which direction I should go. Camcorders with DVD-RW discts? Etc? Transfer using USB?

Also, I'm on Windows and need a program which I can load the video into from the camera, and edit. All I'm really going to do is put music over the video, and edit in scenes from the shoot. Say a little scene from where the models are getting ready or posing, and it cuts to the final image zooming into the window slowly, and so on.

If anyone has ever done this, or know how I would go about it, I'd appreciate it. Also, if anyone is into this and have examples of your work, I'd like to see it.

Gracias!

pannasonic gs series 3ccd cameras. Cheapest reasonably professional option. They're mini-dv and transfer real time over fire wire.

As for software, Pinnacle Studio should be perfect for your usage. User friendly, but will produce fairly professional results.

Go with any good miniDV camcorder. Canon and Sony make good consumer-level miniDV models. Firewire is preferred over USB for capture, it's faster and often allows for higher resolution captures. For example my Sony DCR-HC40 has both Firewire and USB, but USB is crippled to 320x240 capture IIRC. I would stay away from the DVD camcorders, they are not reliable, tend to be noisy, and image quality can suffer. When you edit the video later, you're editing then re-encoding an already lossy format, resulting in degredation.

I've used a LOT of different capture software, and I always come back to Windows Movie Maker for my routine captures and edits. It's surprisingly powerful and easy to use. It comes with XP, so nothing to buy. ) It will not, however, transcode to MPEG2 (DVD), MPEG4, etc. If you use WMM, make sure to capture as raw DV-AVI (you'll need drive space, about 15GB per hour), edit as you like, and save back to raw AVI. Then use a transcode tool like Nero Vision Express or TMPGenc to encode to DVD or whatever format. That way you're only compressing once.

Yeah, I was looking into that Windows Movie maker. It seemed pretty decent and easy to use. I guess I would have to learn how to slice up the scenes and put the music over, but I'm sure I can figure something out. I mainly want to put them on the Internet to embed them say, my website, or MySpace account via YouTube.

I'll keep reading over your post dmorris, until I completely understand all of that considering it's my first time looking into something like this. I'm all about digital and film still cameras, but this is a bit different for me.

windows movie maker is trash, please do yourself a favor and don't use it. I honestly have never used a worse program(well I did use iMovie with 32mb of ram in highschool) than wmm.

[quote2aaeff9a5a="Darkside"]windows movie maker is trash, please do yourself a favor and don't use it. I honestly have never used a worse program(well I did use iMovie with 32mb of ram in highschool) than wmm.[/quote2aaeff9a5a]
We'll have to agree to disagree then. ;)

I've used all of them, including Pinnacle and Sony Vegas Pro (the $600 version, not the $50 consumer version). I always come back to WMM for my routine stuff. It handles 98% of what I need, so I think calling it trash and the worst program ever is a bit of an exaggeration. roll

[quotef0f8707f97="dmorris68"][quotef0f8707f97="Darkside"]windows movie maker is trash, please do yourself a favor and don't use it. I honestly have never used a worse program(well I did use iMovie with 32mb of ram in highschool) than wmm.[/quotef0f8707f97]
We'll have to agree to disagree then. ;)

I've used all of them, including Pinnacle and Sony Vegas Pro (the $600 version, not the $50 consumer version). I always come back to WMM for my routine stuff. It handles 98% of what I need, so I think calling it trash and the worst program ever is a bit of an exaggeration. roll[/quotef0f8707f97]

WMM is basic, not trash lol.

If you want more professional looking videos, go with Adobe Premier for your editing and to add effects/polish to your video, use Adobe After Effects. (of course both of those programs can be "acquired" if you can't afford them)

If you're new to editing, then dmorris is right...give WMM a shot first. You can always upgrade if you need to later.

Interesting. Keep the info coming guys, I'm definately taking notes.


One of my friends has a camera, but it records onto small discs. Before I ask her to let me borrow it, because I have a photo shoot soon, how easy is it to transfer the info from the camera to my computer?

And if you do need more than WMM can deliver, I recommend Sony Vegas. I haven't tried the cheap consumer version to give an honest opinion of it, but the pro version is quite powerful and is on par with Premier, in fact I actually prefer Vegas to Premier.

I use adobe premiere pro, it works great.

AVID?

Get a new avatar

Who, me?

[quote1158c27c87="unknown uchiha"]AVID?[/quote1158c27c87]

If his camera costs less than 2gs thats excessive

There is a free version of AVID

http//www.avid.com/freedv