Video Editing Software Challenge

May 5, 2007 7:54 PM

Video Editing Filter: Does anyone know of free or almost free software that is even just a little better than Windows Movie Maker?

Movie Maker was fine when I made a movie from stills after my last AskMe, but for actual vid editing, it kinda sucks. I'm not looking for any special effects, just the ability to capture multiple clips and actually cut them to shreds and splice them back as I see fit. The ability to add audio would be cool too.

I imagine, though, that given the tool to properly cut up the vid I could use Movie Maker for the audio.

If it's apparent that I just don't know what I'm doing, advice there would be nice too!

Any ideas are greatly appreciated. Thanks folks!

posted by snsranch to media & arts (9 comments total)

iMovie comes free with Macs, if you have a friend who has one. It is generally pretty well regarded.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:01 PM on May 5, 2007

Here is a list of a few to get you started.

I've heard good things about Adobe Premiere Elements in the past, and it's only like $100.
posted by drstein at 8:05 PM on May 5, 2007

Try to get an older version of something off of eBay. I got Sony Vegas 4.0 for like $30.
posted by fvox13 at 8:08 PM on May 5, 2007

VirtualDub is what a lot of people use for video manipulation, though I wouldn't call it a full nonlinear editing solution.
posted by effugas at 8:36 PM on May 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

Avid Free.

Avid's free software. Cross platform. Useable. 2 video tracks, four audio tracks. Not exactly 'intuitive', but a quite bit more powerful. And the right price.
posted by filmgeek at 8:38 PM on May 5, 2007 [5 favorites]

filmgeek, yea, that is definately the ticket. Still trying to figure it out, but it's obviously a great tool. (And free!) Thanks to everyone, if anything great comes of this I'll post it to Projects.
posted by snsranch at 9:36 PM on May 5, 2007

I was just thinking about this myself earlier today!

Thanks to snsranch for asking the question, and thanks to filmgeek for the pointer to Avid Free. I'll be trying that out as well.
posted by Inkslinger at 9:57 PM on May 5, 2007

Er, maybe this is a stupid answer, but I've gotten some good use out of VirtualDub in the past, which is open source, fairly popular and I -think- it's the kind of thing you're looking for....
posted by JHarris at 9:48 AM on May 9, 2007

I know this is a late post, but Avid Free isn't available any more. What should someone do at this point?
posted by billtron at 6:44 PM on March 19