Best Editing Program?

[Thinkly]

I am fairly new to this whole movie deal. I have only made a handful of movies and the only program i have used is Windows Movie Maker 2. I am starting to get more people asking me to make movies and I realize that i am going to need a better editing program than WMM2 because it has severe limitations.

1. It does not save to AVI well. It drops frames and is useless for saving high quality video. The audio is fine when saving to AVI but the video is the problem.

2. I can use WMM2 to save it as high quality NTSC (wmv) but the video suffers.

If I am to get deeper into this movie making business, I realize that I am going to need better hardware and also a better editing program. Presently I have a Dell Dimension 4500 Pentium 4, 2.4 ghz, 512 MB RAM and 80 G HDD.

Will this computer be up to the task of handling large AVI files if I add a couple big hard drives?

What editing program can i buy that will support high quality video and audio and still have the full functionality that WMM2 has? (transitions, effects, etc.)

Thanks for any help.

[UncasMS]

with another (bigger) hdd and maybe an additonal 512 mb ram your hardware should be able to handle your editing

decent editing software could come from ulead, pinnacle or magix

[murdo182]

I study at a media uni and we use Avid and Final Cut Pro these are the industrie standard but come at a price Avid ranging from £1000 ($1500) and final cut pro £600 ($850) if you carnt aford that (like me!!)

the next best afordable thing is Adobe Premiere i use this as its user friendly and has all the elements required of an editing program to produce pro results (plus changing and saving formats is simple, which i need to be able to use with the Avid

Hope This Helps

M

[UncasMS]

well, premiere is a great tool, but i wouldnt dare calling it *user friendly* just as i wouldnt call photoshop an easy imaging tool

in addition to the fact, that one really has to be familiar with adobe prmiere, it is way more expensive than other solutions

[DAFT]

I tried to use Avid on my old system and it crushed my RAM. Is there any type of editing software that is less memory intensive. I can't run anything while i use it and i like to listen to music while i work. Any suggestions?

[mastercontrol]

You could try Sony Vegas. It retails for about $450US. They also have a Vegas+DVD package, which includes Vegas, DVD Architect and AC-3 Encoding.

I have Vegas on my system (2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM) and it works pretty well. You can render to avi, mpeg, Windows media and other formats.

[shulthise]

I use Sony Vegas 4.0 for video editing. I found it surprisingly easy to learn and very intuitive to use.
Its also very rich with features, filters, Plugins etc.

I tried other apps before, uleads, movie maker, main actor, and premire...
I think Vegas out-bests all I tried on the general score..

I'm a PC user, though.. Maybe some of the Mac apps are better..

[tigerman8u]

I like Ulead video studio and womble mpeg video wizard