Community poll forum: What do you do with your home videos after filming?

I've been through Pinnacle, Ulead, Roxio, MyDVD and Windows Movie Maker and finally found Sony's product. The only thing I could ever ask for in Vegas is a storyboard view but I've gotten used to working without one.

Your answer would be Adobe Primiere Pro.

Does everything you would want Final Cut Pro to do. However, the only drawback is that its not on a Mac Platform, which means its not easy as cheese to understand. In other words, if you;ve never used Final Cut Pro, or have vary little experience with it, you may have very little idea what you are doing. I would suggest tutorials if you're new to editing with higher end applicatons.

Another drawback would be price, however if your even considering purchasing final cut, you probably are aware of the investment and might find it worth your money to not purchase a mac just fro final cut.

If this interests you, I believe adobe's website offers a 15 or 30 day trial of the program for free.

nuff said

I have a Fuji Finepix m603. Apart from taking good stills, it takes excellent Video as well (30 FPS @ 640x480). Fuji dont make this camera anymore (which is a shame) when I bought it a couple of years ago, it was the best quality Video I could find (other DSC record video at only 15 FPS or only 320x240 which both look terrible).
It can use Microdrives / Compact Flash and xd Memory cards, so I can easily record a couple of hours of high quality Video. 1GB xd / CFII cards are cheap at about 15 - 20 each and are of course reusable.

It records to an AVI format file (Motion Jpeg I believe) which I can easily convert to MPG2 / DIVx / XVID using free tools (AVI2VCD / TMPGEnc) Which I can then play on my cheap DIVX DVD Player.

I tried using Adobe Premier and AVS (a free Non-Linear Video Editing program), but to be honest, their highly structured *Project* based approach to Video Editing leaves me cold. Totall over-engineered and with a very steep learning curve exasperated by an over-friendly user interface that really just gets in the way.

I do rudimentary editing using VirtualDub (free & excellent) and more clever stuff with AVISynth (a free scripting approach to Video Editing that uses VirtualDub to render the finished Video).

VirtualDub works exactly as you expect it to and you will be editing Video within seconds of loading up your video clip.

I still havent found a nice free (simple) tool that will help me author a *regular* DVD with Menus and stuff, but then again, most DVD players will happily play a simple MPG file found on a CD or DVD, so I just burn my 2 or 3 MPG Video Clips onto a CD using the CD Burnng SW that came bundled with my PC.

I use iMovie because it it makes good looking movies and it came with my mac.

I just bought Pinnale Stidio 10 and I am learning the software. Pulled off still shots of running rafts through whitewater on the Colorado river. So far... Pinnacle rocks!

I think Pinnacle tends to be a bit buggy for people.. But overall its a VERY easy to use application with limited possibilities. However, if your just editing home videos it's probably perfect for you.

Since the new addition to our family 3 years ago, we went out and bought a Sony Digital 8 DCR-TRV250, a Sony CyberShot DSC-F828 8 Meg Pixel Camera and a 3.2 Ghz PC with 2GB memory and (2) 300GB HD's . As new parents we started taking lots of pictures and as time goes by we have slowed considerabley. However with all the taping and photos and her parents in one state and mine in another, we needed to put this stuff on DVD's and send them a set as well. We tried several editing softwares that were cheap to purchase, but was also cheap quality (You get what you pay for).
We finally bought Pinnacle Studio 8 (www.pinnaclesys.com) with a VIVO card (Video In & Video Out) which later we upgraded to Studio 9. This software has been the easiest to use and makes very excellent quality DVD's. We can easily add and mix photos and video recordings, as well as add background music from either MP3's, WAV's or from the SmartSound library that is included with the software. Pinnacle Studio is absolutely our choice for editing when we are short of time since it is quick and easy to use.
I am the sort of person who loves to experiment with everything, so I also tried other more expensive software including the Adobe CS2 Suite & Premiere Pro. I love challenges and their software is just that, but if ever you want a software with all the bells and whistles, they have it! Their Photoshop CS2 is the absolute best for editing your photos. Touch-ups to get rid of of a pimple or sightless mole is easy and flawless with the ''Spot Healing brush tool''. Adobe has demos at their web site (www.adobe.com) you should go check them out. Their software is not cheap, it's not all that easy to use (at first), but you do get the very best professional quality available photos (even from scans) and videos from your equipment. Photo prints outs after touch ups in Photoshop are as beautiful as if a professional had taken them with an expensive camera.
If you are going to make family photos you may want to consider to make appoinments on your calendar as a ''TO-DO item''. Otherwise you will end up throwing your tapes or discs on a shelf and not getting things done. Then their is a chance you may not get to see that stuff ever again, esp. if you have one of those old dinosaurs Beta or VCR tape formats. Children grow fast and it is a shame to have pictures of them crawling and learning to walk and none of them during the other significant moments that could bring a laugh or tears to your eyes later.

Indeed, it is a program that does it all. Fairly hard to use if you are inexperience with higher end applications. You may want to seach or invest for/in tutorials for it. OR you can always take a class.

In conjunction with a video capturing device (ADS Tech Pyro A/V Link) I'm in the process of learning to use APE 2.0 to edit and burn my VHS and 8 mm tapes to DVD. I could also use this software to edit miniDVD tapes and burn the captured video to DVD in the same way. Since APE 2.0 is robust software, I'm now in the process of building a faster computer that will be able to handle this task easily.

We used to record lengthy movies on the camcorder, then go through the process (using the old Intel WebCam with S-Video input) of converting them to AVI / MPEG and possibly writing them out to disk.

However, with our Casio Exilim digital camera, we now just take lots of 5,10,15,30 second, up to a few minutes of video clips. These are already in AVI format, which is nice. Before putting them on the web, we often do a quick input / export using MS Movie Maker to cut down the size.

We used to (and I'm sure everyone does) get bored with home movies, video clips are so much more palatible and entertaining.

For interntional travel, like a recent trip three week trip to Africa, I I used Pinnacle 9 to edit, title and burn a DVD. I did not add narration because my HP computer crashed. I'm going to finish the editing job using Apple iMac's i Photo

As I said, I leave it on the 8mm tapes.
For one thing, what is the projected life of a DVD? Two or three years.
A tape will last twenty. At least.

I use Pinnacle 9 to produce DVD's from mini dv tapes. It is a fairly slow process but gives good results.
Recently, my 6 year old camcorder was lost so I had to consider which format would be my replacement. I dismissed dvd for the reasons given in your thread; I was tempted by hdd ones, but at the time in the UK that was limited to JVC and Sony and I had some mini dv tapes which had not been transferred and would have had no way of viewing them.
I have therefore bought a new tape based machine, a Panasonic NV-GS280 and hope I have made the right choice.

Pinnacle Studio 10 Plus Titanium. I clean up and edit audio for my movies with 10 and Adobe Audition 2.0 .