Need some help with home video editing

[JoshT]

Hey folks, hoping to borrow from the collective experiences in here for a little project I'm trying to figure out.

A co-worker had a Hitachi Hybrid Camcorder. She's used this thing for the last couple of years to record her son's high school wrestling tournaments. Well she's wanting to make DVDs of each student's matches that they can give to college recruiters/coaches. If she were asking about a hardware problem it would be fixed already but audio/video editing is new to me.

What I want to do is rip the videos from the mini disks that the Camcorder uses, and save them as a computer friendly format. I then want to be able to edit those videos, mostly be able to cut and splice them, maybe be able to add some title screens or captions with the student name and match info. Finally I want to be able to burn them to disk in a DVD player friendly format. I'm having trouble finding software (freeware) that will work for this, or I'm not understanding how to use what I've found properly. Any recommendations on what to try? I would prefer to stick with freeware, and realize that I'll probably need two or three different programs to make it work.

I'm willing to train myself on almost any software, and once I learn the lady seems to be a quick study so I can teach her how to use it. I'd do most of the work for her, but she said she has almost 200 of those mini disks. I'm currently on 12 hour shifts (about 16 hours from the time I leave home to the time I get back), and I'm a part time student. I just don't have time to spend a lot of time figuring this out.

Thanks in advance for any advice and input.
-Josh

 

[cvar]

A great web site for that is http://www.videohelp.com

 

[shane96ranger]

I have Cyberlink Powerdirector and it will let you do all of that. You can download a free trial for it and see if it works for you. It's a large file though. I love it's abilities to save in such a vast array of formats.

http://www.cyberlink.com/downloads/trials/powerdirector/download_en_US.html

 

[martin]

You should already have windows movie maker on your computer, it should do what you want to do. If you're running a mac, there's a similar program on them. If you're running linux, I don't know. Video editing is very time intensive.

 

[JoshT]

Couldn't rip the mini disks with WMM, but I think it will do the rest. It took a little searching and trial and error but I finally found a program that would rip them. Ended up using Handbrake, it was the only thing that I found that would rip them and keep the audio, everything else was loosing the audio or the video royally sucked. Now I've been playing with settings to retain the best quality possible with the lowest file size I can manage. So far I knocked it down from almost a 900MB video file to about 550MB with no noticeable loss in quality to me. I've actually gotten it down to about 200MB but Not really sure if there's no loss or if my eyes are just too bad to see it. My next step is to present a few different versions of same rip, and see if she can see a difference. The smaller I can get the file size the better it is for her to work with, both in terms of drive space and system load. Once I've verified which settings to use, I'll rip the rest of the disks 10 disks she gave me to experiment with and start playing with WMM. As soon as I have the process down I'll teach her how to do it to the other 150 or so that are left.

Did get one thing out of this, found out I really need a better CPU cooler. First time my CPU has ever run close to 100% capacity, so I've never really seen what kind of temps it'll run. My normal CPU idle temps are sub 30°c, when encoding these videos it jumps up to around 75°c. I only takes like 15 minutes to encode one of these 30 minute videos and I'm still running the stock Intel cooler so I can't complain too much. If I decided to start overclocking then the first order of business will be installing a better cooler, probably liquid cooling.