Lights, Camera, Action!

October 31, 2006 1:03 PM

Inexpensive digital video recording and editing for a pre-teen?

My 12-year-old son is interested in fooling around with making his own movie shorts and editing them on our WinXP box. He also likes stop-action / claymation movies in addition to those using real people. Digital Blue's Digital Movie Creator 2.0 at $100 looks interesting. Any experience, suggestions? Thanks!

posted by ZenMasterThis to technology (6 comments total)

Windows Movie Maker? It's probably already on your PC, but is a free update if you don't have it. While not the most advanced editor, it's great for "fooling around", and can easily import images for stop-action.

Also, FWIW, you can get a 30 day, fully functional trial of Adobe Premiere, if your son is interested in using a professional quality program. It's nice to get a feel for what advanced features are out there, and to become used to the layout of high end editing programs.
posted by niles at 1:19 PM on October 31, 2006

Sorry, I didn't make that clearer; need the camera, too. The Digital Blue kit above includes both.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:21 PM on October 31, 2006

The Digital Blue contest site will give you an idea of what to expect from the camera. The video quality is poor, as expected, but if all your son wants to do at this point is make fun videos to e-mail to his pals, it will suffice. The Godzilla video has a lot of stop-motion in it, so it should be possible to do stop-motion using the included software.

Should your son decide to pursue video editing further, you might want to look into buying a really cheap MiniDV camcorder (you can pick up a camcorder for under $500 these days) and a Firewire card for use with Windows Movie Maker. You can also put together a system using stuff you might already own; an old camcorder with composite video output (nearly every camcorder in existence has this) and a USB video capture dongle like one of these can fill in for the MiniDV/Firewire hardware in a pinch. Again, you'd use Windows Movie Maker to edit the clips together. It's a bit more trouble to get all the analog bits to play well together, but if you're on a budget it's worth a little extra hassle.
posted by chrominance at 2:26 PM on October 31, 2006

I've had a great time with the Sony Cybershot digital cameras. They take decent shots (for a point and click) and take GREAT video for a digitial camera. You can shoot at 30 frames per second (with the right memory card)

">Sony Cybershots

When I'm at home I'll give you a link to some of the videos I've shot.
posted by allthewhile at 2:40 PM on October 31, 2006

I'm not sure if you need a digital camera or a camcorder, but I wanted to recommend the Sony Handycam hc32. I love it because it's not too complicated to use, and it's small enough so I can easily hold it steady in one hand. I paid $650 for it almost two years, but now you can get it for under $250.

As far as software, I think Windows Movie Maker is as "Easy" as it gets. I believe it's already on most PCs (assuming you have one, that is) and you can always download it from Microsoft.
posted by damnjezebel at 4:15 PM on October 31, 2006

I made this rather artsy video of my daughter with a sony cybershot digital camera, some ziploc bags, and windows movie maker (comes default with most windows pcs)

Just thought I'd show you that you can do some cool things with it. I'm not sure if he'd be down with it. The one drawback would be only about 30 minutes shooting time with a 1 gig memory stick. I never had a problem with it, just meant I had to plan shots out beforehand.
posted by allthewhile at 10:26 PM on October 31, 2006