[Wiltshire] Peoples' experience with movie-editing, stitching, converting tools... ?

[John Callam-Anderson]

Simon Iremonger wrote:
> A friend of mine is having all sorts of havoc with dealing with
>    videos from their new camera whick outputs MOV (quicktime?)
>    files... They no longer work in the old windows-movie-maker.

Bear in mind that .MOV is only a container just as .AVI is, so the 
actual codecs contained within it may vary from one .MOV to the other. 
If your friend wants to continue working with windows-movie-maker 
because they're familiar with it and are continuing to use Windows then 
they may want to convert their mov files to something compatible with 
WMM using VDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/)?

> I am actually interested it what sort of programs people use
>    to edit, convert, stitch videos (including still flames
>    and many input-formats) ... ?

AFAIK, most NLEs don't play with multiple formats all that well. Best 
course of action is generally to convert all your material to the 
best-quality, most editable format which hopefully the majority of your 
video is in. Most "professional" NLEs will require to convert your video 
to at least DV. I was going to recommend Avid FreeDV 
(http://www.avid.com/freedv) as your friends are Windows users, but 
sadly seems to be discontinued :(

> Apparently the (uugh!) 'windows movie maker' is akin to the
>    sort of tool, but thats' unstable, inflexible, windows-only,
>    non-free seemingly!

Sounds like most NLEs available ;)

> I've heard of 'cinelarra' -- does anybody use this? how
>    well does it work? etc...

One day I'm going to try this, but it looks too unstable for production 
work sadly...

> What other video editing/converting/stitching programs do people
>    out there use on (any OS) ?  What actually works?

VDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) :)

> I heard there was some very good GPL software for converting
>    videos for display on many portable-players... but thats'
>    not a full editor..

Have you looked at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sive/ if it's ipod 
specific? I've not tried it, but heard good things.