Just got a Go Pro HD for general team and messing about videos and need some decent editing software.

Any suggestions, needs to be as easy and quick to use as possible and allow put music and writing on the video too.

Don’t want to spend any/too much money on it either

Thanks in advance 😀

Doesn’t your computer have some free Windows movie maker software pre installed?

Yes, however I was under the impression that was a bit rubbish 😕

Ah, OK. Why rubbish? What’s wrong with it? It’ll do everything you’ve asked for.

Ah, no the computer doesn’t have it for some reason, other suggestions please or if anyone has a copy spare 😉

You should be able to download Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft for free.

It’s actually pretty decent, will do all the basics without any hassle.

Ok cheers, Steve will give that a go, first proper digital camera so all a learning experience 😀

LoCo, if you can get a hold of anything better than WMM it makes a big difference. I tried it and wasn’t impressed, I also tried Power Director and found it very slow and buggy. I got hold of an old copy of premier pro and it’s awesome, really fast and does everything you would want it to do.

The new WMM sucks as the time line is missing. Dumbed down version.

However, the old version 2.6 is still available from MS here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=34

Have downloaded both current and 2.6 WMM, already done a video with new version and will try with 2.6 later, the footage isn’t great quality so will wait till I get a bit more GO Pro stuff before deciding if I need anything better.

Thanks 😀

sony vegas HD platinum is pretty good and apparently is available via some torrent thingy

WMM is average to poor, but the best bit is it’s free. Don’t expect much from Microsoft and they won’t let you down. If you want to edit GoPro camera footage you’ll need to transcode it for WMM with software sold elsewhere, you see where this is going…
I’m sure other stuff is out there but they’ll charge. Sorry.

Will WMM work with MP4 video files? Win Media Player won’t play them (the XP version anyway)

Dual boot Linux (or even just run it from a pendrive as you need it) and use KDEnlive. Free, HD ready, will mix-n-match pretty much any formats you throw at it, and as good as (if not better than) any of the cheaper cut-down versions of the pro apps from Adobe, Sony, etc.

slainte 😀 rob

I thought WMM was pretty good – better than an earlier version of iMovie I was using. Unless you need specifically spangly features then it’ll do what you need well.

this was with movie maker (and a rubbish camera)

[video]http://www.vimeo.com/3451197[/video]

this was with Final Cut (and a proper camera)

[video]http://www.vimeo.com/10282487[/video]

@pook

I like the first one 🙂

Another one for movie maker here.

Done with WMM 2.6
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOJ1_pGcmpM[/video]

Stop Motion with WMM 2.6 [bit crap as my web is super low res]
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2w2xSjzDnc[/video]

WMM on Windows7 handles native GoPro files no bother and is fine for general editing. I use the vista version which needs the files converting which is a faff (and reduces quality).

I’ve tried a few of the dedicated programmes but my laptop doesn’t have the whoosh to run them well and some plain refused to work at all.

I’ll stick with WMM for now.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwnrHeolAGs&hd=1[/video]

WMM is pants once you have used something proper!!

Used Adobe Premiere which is really good and hopefully the elements version is worth it

Lightworks is meant to be fairly good/dogs nads

I’m not a fan of the newest movie maker, it runs faster than the XP version but the way you edit with it is crap compared to a proper bit of software. My favourite is FCP but obviously only “free” if you get it illegally. Premiere is OK but doesn’t always handle HD amazingly – CS5 is good but still not as good as FCP unless you have an adobe-recommended graphics card.

sony vegas HD platinum is pretty good and apparently is available via some torrent thingy

It’s also avaiable for £30 if you like to pay for the software you use.

Most movie editing software have 30 day trials, so you can work out if it does what you need. I use Vegas, and I like it, but Magix also do a low cost editor which was good.

+1 for Sony Vegas HD Platinum. I downloaded a free trial version to make sure it would run on my PC before buying, as it’s pretty CPU and RAM hungry. Works a treat for me.

Sony Vegas Studio HD Platinum 10 here… Very nice. I tried another version of Vegas previously- I think possibly the non-platinum version- and it couldn’t adequately preview the native Gopro vids, of course everyone said “It’s your computer” but since it works fine with Platinum, obviously it isn’t.

I guess what I’m saying here is, demo first.

Oh, Powerdirector was absolutely terrible. There are workarounds for its failings but it’s almost like it was designed to make your videos look worse, you need to manually intervene at every stage to avoid it killing the quality. Bizarre frankly.