Action.. and cut!
Video editing is a challenge. Anyone who has tried definitely would have some story to tell. I’ve had mine before. I took another dig at composing and editing the captured home video. This thing needs the following:
- Plenty of your precious weekend time (count in quarters of the day no less!)
- Your spouse’s acceptance that you’ll be unavailable for the rest of the day
- Tons of hard disk space and real good hardware (something I’m struggling on)
- Windows Movie Maker 2.0
- TMPGEnc Encoder
- A good CD burner
I started capturing from my unit DCR-PC9e. It’s a small grab of 20-minutes from our Diwali celebrations at a friend’s place. This seemingly simple task took almost a whole damned day, that your patience will begin to flag.
Searching through Google, I came across forums discussing ” Howto convert WMV to MPG “. This is important stuff because it is the one aspect that defines the software to be used.
You’d ask why would you bother to use a Windows WMV format when it is not compatible with VCD / DVD or any goddamn format that most players in the market are capable of. Funny, Microsoft is defining its own standard called HIGHMAT; and the market won’t see HIGHMAT enabled players for another 3-5 years. Sheeesh..What the hell?! Inspite of all that, the best part of making a movie in Movie Maker 2.0 is that it’s good. Great options to add effects, stuffs like titles, credits, background music, you name it, it’s almost got it. And it’s free! So, here’s the cheat sheet for quick steps:
- Add all your cuts and effects, background music, titles et al
- The file is then saved as yourmovie.WMV
- Rename that file to yourmovie.ASF
- Open TMPGEnc Encoder and select the above .ASF file
- Encode it to MPEG-1 (2.1Mbps NTSC for VCD) with size 352 x 240
- And bang, you get a yourmovie.MPG file
- Open Nero, select the MPG file and burn your VCD.
After all that, he who does all this (I bet) is never going to see another scene of it again; ’cause he’s so tired of watching every frame repeatedly at different conversion times for those forgotten number of hours :no: But then, you forget the pain when someone says wow, that’s good stuff 
alas! why didn’t Sony launch the USB 2 cam back then… now I am stuck with nuthin! I also am on a PC9e for long but w/o a fireport on my box. Never had enuf enthu to tranfer them to CD. Which firewaire card u using?
Nov 4, 03 at 00:24I use a PCMCIA card for firewire, since my machine is a portable. But you might try a Pinnacle package that comes with a solid good card along with its state-of-the-art software. Cheers.
Nov 4, 03 at 07:14