Bill Smith

Member since: Sep 26th, 2006

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Download Squad	3 Comments

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Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 2 (Download Squad)

Sep 26th 2006 8:32PM In Part 1, you mentioned borrowing a laptop. After reading Part 2, may I suggest you modify this to read, "Borrow a Macintosh" laptop. Doing this will save you much headache and heartache. The Mac's all come with iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD preinstalled. iMovie will give you more editing capability than Windows Movie Maker, with more stability, more straightforward use, much better clip capture and managing capabilities, and a much broader range of export options. GarageBand will not only give you thousands of loops, it makes it literally child's play to compose a soundtrack that actually sounds good, and to sync it with your video. You can also use it to generate a Podcast from your video. iMovie and GarageBand were made to work with one another, and you can easily move from one to the other and back again. The same kind of integration exists between GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes and IPhoto to allow you to easily incorporate still photos and slide shows into your video, complete with transitions not available on MS platforms, and allow you to access your music library for use in both videos and photo slideshows. If you do choose to create a DVD, iDVD can be accessed from either iMovie or iPhoto and you can easily make a DVD that look better than most professional ones you buy from Hollywood, with well laid out menus that are easily customized to reflect your project/product.. You can even have motion picture menus that use portions of you video that you select for the motion. The nightmare that you describe for putting out a video can all be avoided. Let your software make the video editing part easy, so you can concentrate on getting the content right.

Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 2 (Download Squad)

Sep 26th 2006 8:21PM In Part 1, you mentioned borrowing a laptop. After reading Part 2, may I suggest you modify this to read, "Borrow a Macintosh" laptop. Doing this will save you much headache and heartache. The Mac's all come with iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD preinstalled. iMovie will give you more editing capability than Windows Movie Maker, with more stability, more straightforward use, much better clip capture and managing capabilities, and a much broader range of export options. GarageBand will not only give you thousands of loops, it makes it literally child's play to compose a soundtrack that actually sounds good, and to sync it with your video. You can also use it to generate a Podcast from your video. iMovie and GarageBand were made to work with one another, and you can easily move from one to the other and back again. The same kind of integration exists between GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes and IPhoto tol allow you to easily incorporate still photos and slide shows into your video, complete with transitions not available on MS platforms, and allow you to access your music library for use in both videos and photo slideshows. If you do choose to create a DVD, iDVD can be accessed from either iMovie or iPhoto and you can easily make a DVD that look better than most professional ones you buy from Hollywood, with well laid out menus that are easily customized to reflect your project/product.. You can even have motion picture menus that use portions of you video that you select for the motion. The nightmare that you describe for putting out a video can all be avoided. Let your software make the video editing part easy, so you can concentrate on getting the content right.

Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 1 (Download Squad)

Sep 26th 2006 6:26PM "Many times, the video format in which you record will not be compatible with the editing software you have. This is especially true of QuickTime .MOV format, which seems to be popular among camera manufacturers, but not among video software writers."

Huh? Windows Movie Maker is about the only video editing software that doesn't understand QuickTime, and QuickTime using the h.264 codec is the best way to present a lot of information with a small file size, so the native QuickTime file formnat is the best choice in most cases for the finished product. Also digital still cameras with a video mode usually record data in mpeg 1 format, and simply label the file with a .mov extension so that it will be opened in QuickTime, a program that most computers have installed.