Week 2/EDLD 5363 Comparison of Video Editing Software

My peer partner and I explored Movie Maker, iMovie, Pinnacle and Camtasia.  I am quite familiar with both Movie Maker and Pinnacle.  I have also worked with iMovie in the past.  I chose Camtasia to also look at because, even though it only records your desktop, it has wonderful editing capabilities. 

Here are the file extensions for each of the options above.

Movie Maker	iMovie	Pinnacle	Camtasia
Initially you have the options of: Save to my computer Save to CD Send in an e-mail Sent to the Web Send to DV Camera Then you have many other options: SWF/FLV/M4V/AVI/WMV	There are 4 options for exporting your project: To Podcast To Camera To QuickTime To iDVD M4V mov movie file	There are numerous export options, arranged into four types: Disc, File, Tape and Web, each with a corresponding icon located at the left portion of the screen. The Disc option allows users to export their movies and burned straight on a disc such as AVCHD, Blu Ray, HD DVD, DVD, SVCD and VCD. File is for saving the movie into file types such as AVI, Flash, MPEG 1, 2 and 4, RealVideo, Sony PSP, iPod and 3GP.	Web CD Blog iPod all SWF/FLV/M4V/AVI/WMV movie file
Windows Media Player file extension options	.asf, .asx, .avi, .wav, .wax, .wma, .wmv

I decided that I will use Movie Maker.  I have used Movie Maker in the past and found it to be fairly easy to maneuver around. Windows Movie Maker allows you to do things such as transitions, special effects, credits and titles, add audio to the movie, and more. You can also use Windows Movie maker for editing audio files.  Overall, Windows Movie maker is a good free software for editing and creating movies and videos, for publishing to DVD, YouTube, or wherever you choose. The following software is required to play back a movie:

• Microsoft Windows 98 or later or Windows NT® 4.0 or later
• Software that can play Windows Media Video (WMV) files, such as Microsoft Windows Media Player 7.0 or later

From my experience with Movie Maker, it is easy to input video, pictures and audio.  There are several problems though with Movie Maker.  I have experienced it “freezing” quite often.  The replay of the video also drags to make it difficult to know where to edit.  I also wish that I had the ability to edit the video audio as you can do in Pinnacle and iMovie.  I did learn that Movie Maker can save to a version that is compatible with many video sites such as YouTube and Teacher Tube. 

I have learned about other video editing software through this assignment.  I especially like Camtasia and I think I will have my students and teachers explore options to use Camtasia in an educational setting.  I have bookmarked many sites during my research of video editing software to refer to when I am working on a project

I viewed a YouTube how-to called “Movie Maker Video Editing Tutorial.”  I have been using Movie Maker for quite a few years, and I learned a couple of tricks from the video.