Quality Editing and DVD Authoring Software

[lostone]

I'm not looking to make special effects movies, although it would be fun if I had that capability.

I'm looking for simple software to to edit and produce DVDs from home videos for easy distribution of movies of my daughter to grandparents, etc.

The software that came with my camera is utter crap and with the expensive holiday season I don't think I'm going to have money to spend on expensive software.

I've heard Adobe Premier is good, but am not ready to invest that kind of money if I can avoid it.

So free would be awesome, cheap would be ok. Any suggestions?

[mikec]

There is a free trial version of Premiere Elements on Adobe's web site. http://www.adobe.com/support/downloa...atform=windows

I have never tried this software. Try it and see if you like it. The software is less than $100US and often bundled with Photoshop Elements for around $125-$135US.

[triple110]

If you want to make quick and dirty DVDs with menus (limited menu background templates), audio choices and subtitles I always use DVD Flick (http://www.dvdflick.net). It is very stable and you can burn to directly to DVD (including DVDRW which will also erase them for you) or .ISO for creating backups.

If you are creating DVDs to play into a wide range of DVD players I suggest using DVD-R (or DVD-R DL{Dual Layer) instead of DVD+R. The reason for this is that some old DVD players or DVD-ROMs won't recognize DVD+R.

As for editing, check out the Wikipedia open source list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ideo_editin g) for a list of current projects. Unless you are using Mac OSX or Linux finding good Open Source video editor is hard to find. For a cheap solution for very cheap editing try out Sony Vegas. It may take you more time to get the editing done but for home videos and beginners. The interface is very visual and intuitive. I haven't used the internal DVD menu creation systems but they are there in the $85 movie studio edition.

Hope that helps

[rick_presas]

Final Cut Express.

$180 and you can edit using the same tools the pros use.


But you should know that any Mac computer already comes with iMovie, which is very decent for your, amd most other, purposes. Use iDVD to burn the DVDs

If you're a windows user, try Windows Movie Maker, which is also already on your computer. It's not as good as iMovie, but it can get the job done. It can also author simple DVDs.