Video editing?

Hey guys(and girls) , just bought myself a great little video camera, Contour Roam2. What's a good program to use for editing the footage I get into a short film worth watching? I'd like to do a little slow mo, splice clips together and cut out the boring bit and add music. And it has to be easy to use because I've never done this before!
Thanks

No idea but Hi Whitey .

Windows movie maker or whatever its called these days is as simple as it gets.
On my old Win7 PC I used Pinnacle 14. (available at Harvey Norman and download)
Now that I'm on a Mac I intend using Final Cut Pro but they do come pre installed with iMovie.

I might be able to find the install DVD for Pinnacle if you're interested but I have moved and there is still a heap of stuff I cant locate

In any case you will need a fairly serious PC/Mac to edit current HD video and its been my experience editing on a laptop is frustrating unless its got some serious grunt and memory.

I'll second what 2WA said about grunt - I was running Movie Edit Pro which I really liked but the old PC running XP just can't cope any more.

I have a Contour GPS, I use Windows Movie Maker when it friggin works, and on Windows 8 pc, i have Photoshop Elements Premiere movie editing program, but still working that shit out. Just remember, the more you edit, with music etc, the longer its going to upload to youtube, well, it takes ages for mine , so good luck!

Hi Gus....thanks for your input!
I know I haven't been here for a while, but I'm still getting out and about on my Bandit.
I had an idea that my current 5 year old laptop running Vista might be close to retirement anyway so I'll have to make sure I get a decent one then. Will be sticking with a PC cause thats what I know.

Just bought a new laptop.
HP with i7 processor.
4 g of ram
1 g grafix card
Should do the trick ay? Running windows 8 so still working out how to use it!

whitey1 wrote:Just bought a new laptop.
HP with i7 processor.
4 g of ram
1 g grafix card
Should do the trick ay? Running windows 8 so still working out how to use it!

It will be much better with 32gb of ram or whatever the max is with Win 8.
The trouble with laptops is they have a heap of crap running in the background and generally have a slower HDD.
The same specs in a desktop would flog a laptop. Still its current spec so will be an improvement

Have you chosen an editor yet Whitey?

2Wheels.... the biggest problem with laptops were the slow shitty hard drives. With SSD's it's pretty even stevens unless you are playing the latest 3D games as you can;t just change out the graphics card for something gruntier.

I do agree with 8Gb or more in a Windows 7/8 box. I hate Windows 8 with no start menu, be prepared to hate it and buy an applikcation on the net to make the start bar return. Why Microsoft thought a touch interface works for desktops have me beat. Apple have a seperate OS for dekstops/laptops over the tablets and phones.... no point reinventing the wheel right

reddog wrote:2Wheels.... the biggest problem with laptops were the slow shitty hard drives. With SSD's it's pretty even stevens unless you are playing the latest 3D games as you can;t just change out the graphics card for something gruntier.

I do agree with 8Gb or more in a Windows 7/8 box. I hate Windows 8 with no start menu, be prepared to hate it and buy an applikcation on the net to make the start bar return. Why Microsoft thought a touch interface works for desktops have me beat. Apple have a seperate OS for dekstops/laptops over the tablets and phones.... no point reinventing the wheel right

I agree....... partly. SSD are faster but they have a limited read/write life cycle. Current crop are good for about 100,000 cycles. My new iMac has a combo fusion drive (3tb) and if it wasnt for a 6 week wait for the regular hdd I would have got a regular hdd.
I have not used Win8 but "playing" at HN the interface didnt grab me.

For what it's worth every day I use a combo of ios, win xp, android, osx & win7 and I can tell you here and now not one os triumphs all the others. They all do something well and lack in other areas. It all comes down to what you do and want from your device.

Sorry for getting off topic.

Data rate is very important when editing HD, my little gopro records up to 45 mega bits per second my, pro camera shoots 1080p at 23 megabits per second. So you need fast drives 7800 rpm spinners is a must most, windows laptops only have 5400 rpm drives as standard so this is big problem when dealing with video with hi bit rates. The drift and the contour roam record up to 10 mbps which you will get away with on most low end computers. If you have a desktop make sure your drive is a fast one but the more you fill it the slower it gets. to give you an example i have a Apple mac pro monster big processors and lots of ram, i edit in final cut pro x. As i was editing project (weddings) final cut was crashing every few minutes, what is the problem, data rate! Macs hdd drives which i have 4 x 1tb could not keep up the required data rate that fcp x wanted, to fix this i did a data rate test on each drive and found that i was only getting about 35 to 50 mbps whilst this is faster than the video i have recorded, fcpx wanted more, hence the i introduced it to the software raid 0, i linked to drives to make 1 big one the advantages is a massive boost in speed up a 170 mbps now fcpx is very happy, but the down side is redundancy is gone mean if one drive fails you loose the lot so make a back up .
Now i have bored you with this tech stuff for a reason, you may think you need a really powerful computer to edit with wrong, you need really fast disk drives , my mac pro sadly had a nasty date with lightening and is awaiting the replacement from the insurance company, so i have been editing on a mac mini which is a core 2 duo 2.4 cpu with 4 gig of ram and a pissey graphics card, but i have a esata/usb 3 external raid drive 8tb that pulls 170 mega bits a second through the USB port so i am getting away it for the short time, its slow but i dont get any crashes from fcpx. If you really want to get into video editing for what ever reason seriously look at a mac, imovie is great and easy to learn on then up date to fcpx, motion and compressor.
It your in to windows remember this if laptop/ pc has vista or xp on it you going to have learn a new OS any way so its a good time to look at a mac, just ask 2wa

Now that you've scared people off Jim lets corner the market and hire ourselves out to shoot and edit bike action video

Dont dispute what you said but you made it sound scary and expensive and for the average Jo Blow it doesn't have to be.

I'm uploading to Vimeo right now the video I shot yesterday and after fumbling around iMovie for 30 mins last night it looks ok to me.

I dont mean to scare people off, its one of those things when shooting in hd or even taking dslr pic in raw basic old povo laptop or desk top is not going to cut it, i also left out the fact that most editing suites, like industry based apple fcpx and adobe premier convert the native file into a larger file type, like apple prores.
Like me 2wa you started journey from the pc editing to mac editing and these are the interesting things that you find, oh by the way stick with vimeo and you tube the dvd/ blueray disk is dead just like the floppy disk

I should have added that im pretty impressed with iMovie.
It doesn't do everything I need but its easy to use and this iMac, well lets just say it rendered 8 minutes quicker than it took to make a coffee

Well when you get the fcpx suite it will be very good