Hey all,

Judi and I are just now getting around to putting all her video footage together into digital format on DVD and webpage. She has sony trv50 handycam using digital mini cassettes. |What I am wondering is what program would I use to take the video off the camcorder through the AV ports or usb port and make DVD's?

any help would be greatly appreciated

Dale: Do you have Windows? Movie Maker will do it, and its free When it downloads/imports a file, it breaks it into clips automatically, which takes a while, but leaves manageable pieces to work with. Seems to be nearly random where it does it, and you'll need to stitch some too short ones back together, and break other long ones. I had tried it once about a year ago and it seemed really confusing and hard to figure out. When I tried it again a week ago it seemed very easy, and I figured out how to use the 'timeline' at the bottom properly (of course, it doesn't work that well and the sound track time doesn't quite match what it exports, but hey its free). So my advice is to try a couple of short bits to figure out how the program is organized on the interface and how it works a piece at a time, and don't invest too much frustration at first, just wait a day.

I found I dropped out the clearly junk stuff quickly, but still had 20 minutes of video left, and it was really hard to chose what was left to cut it to 6 minutes!

And don't be shy of putting it on the net after, I've been very surprised at the reaction to mine, which I was considering a practice run, I didn't get a single "lame" comment (I expected lots with a longboard in pretty light winds and flat water). What people really seemed to like was the background of the Victoria waterfront - I guess its exotic to other people. If you have shots that show some of the big trees at the Nat, the crazy camping, kids playing in the river, etc, put a couple of those in between the kites lofting and I guarantee people will love it!

I haven't tried out any other programs yet. I was ready to buy one based on a computer magazines 'best buy, editor's choice' but luckily went on to read the comments, which were universally "total crap, couldn't get it to run without a fresh install of Windows" etc. There was about 40 comments, and the average consumer rating was 1 out of 5 (and many said they would have rated 0 with the option). So I decided to stick with Movie Maker to start, and saved a hundred bucks.

Thanks Morley,

We did discover that we were attempting to upload video throught the USB port but were using the wrong cable. Once we used the right cable, voila, the Windows Movie Maker program came up and the next 7 hours of editing were born. Judi finalized the movie down to two minutes, but holy crap it is 20meg. She posted it on utube but when we do a search under Jemma Snowboarding, it does not find it...hmmmm. Anyhow thanks for the reply. No doubt I will posting other "help" questions in the near future on our foray into video editing.

Dale: Just log onto your video (youtube) 'cut' the url & 'paste' in on this forum & the Nitinaht site. Then we will have access ... Did you figure out the adding of music on movie maker ? It's fairly easy.

Here is judes first production

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Jj0j1Ingw[/youtube]

Well done ... A gifted free stylist !!!

Nice Work ! Good Music !

You should be able to search out your video by whatever text you put in the tags box in youtube, when you are logged in as the video owner.
The tags box is next to the red arrow in this pic..