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Have you seen the videos made online to put on your website
Making videos using tools such as windows movie maker or windows live movie maker can be done for free. However, if you have Vista, be sure the the program works OK. If you have changed any permissions you may encounter issues such as not being able to create the movie.
Video Editing Free Tools
There are usually two applications on the PC as stated above, Movie maker and Live movie maker. Live looks more “modern” but can be more temperamental. Movie maker is more error tolerant , especially when using 64 bit Vista. There is also Jing for smaller videos and this has a paid version. It seems to work OK with Vista. Another option for PowerPoint style videos is Animoto. Camstudio is also anther option. Many of the other free options may have issues with Vista. You can check them out yourself , but from experience I can say some of the older ones will have permission issues and will not work well with Vista.
Video Editing paid options
For paid applications the main standard is Camtasia. You can get a free trial for 30 days to see if it is right for you. They have a very strong support structure so can help with most technical issues. With Vista 64 bit you may encounter some issues depending on the user profile set up in Vista. On one machine I set up the only way I could get it run was to use the “full” administrator rights. There are others such as NCH Debut. Debut has a free option you can use and is split into several modules. For a basic record and edit system it will be less than half the cost of Camtasia but will have fewr features such as editing and enhancement features . It works well with Vista.
Editing Methods
For most of the video editing systems, especially the free ones the movie will have to be in a format that can be read by the software. For recording Camtasia and Debut will use an internal format to record.
Once you a recording you can do many things. You can add a soundtrack and put it into you movie by using drag and drop features. You can also cut out parts of the movie (trim & split), you can add other movies into you main one. Special transitions such as fading in and out of sequences, annotations and titles can also be added. Once you have what you want the movie is then “rendered”. This creates a complete movie in a format such as avi. With more expensive systems it is possible to output something that can be directly uploaded to your website or YouTube style sites. For the cheaper or free ones you will generally need to have Video Converter tool to change the format to “flv”,mp4 or Swf. Free software such as Format Factory can do this for you . Playback free software such as VLC can also do this.
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