Video editing and conversion

Draft

Introduction

Let's first present a few definitions, taken from various Wikipedia articles.

“Video editing is the process of re-arranging or modifying segments of video to form another piece of video. The goals of video editing are the same as in film editing - the removal of unwanted footage, the isolation of desired footage, and the arrangement of footage in time to synthesize a new piece of footage.” (Video editing, retrieved 16:46, 2 April 2007 (MEST))

“Video capture is the process of converting an analog video signal—such as that produced by a video camera or DVD player—to digital video. The resulting digital data are computer files referred to as a digital video stream, or more often, simply video stream. This is in contrast with screencasting, in which previously digitized video is captured while displayed on a digital monitor. TV tuner cards have a television tuner with the capabilities to capture broadcast television.” (Video capture, retrieved April 22 2012.)

“Video converters are computer programs that can change the storage format of digital video in a process called transcoding.” Comparison of video converters, retrieved April 22, 2012).

“A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot is a picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen, enhanced with audio narration.” (Wikipedia, retrieved April 2012)

This article so far just includes a few software links. See also:

• Multimedia container format (various file formats)
• Codec (encoding of video, audio, etc.)
• Digital video
• Video editing
• Videoconferencing

Video editing Software

Video editing introductions and overviews

• video editing (Wikipedia, short overview)
• non-linear video editing (Wikipedia)
• Video editing software (Wikipedia, Overview)
• Comparison of video editing software (Wikipedia, good comparison, including price, system requirements, feature sets.)
• List of videoediting software (Wikipedia)
• low-cost video-editing tools

Free editing software

• ILife (Wikipedia) Free on recent Macs.
• Windows Movie Maker (Wikipedia). Free on older Win systems, but can't do MP4 (e.g. won't deal with Nokia N73 movies).
• Windows Live Movie Maker (Wikipedia), On Win VISTA/7. Free download from Microsoft
• VirtualDub, free (GNU) video capture and video processing utility for windows, operates on AVI files. See Wikipedia article.
• Cinelerra (Wikipedia) Free for Linux. There are two versions:
  • Cinelerra CV (community version of cinelerra). See the manual.
  • To install on Ubuntu: see [1] and giss.tv (you have to install all the libraries you find there).
  • Cinelerra Heroine (more the orginal, comes only in source code.)
• Blender (Wikipedia). Multiplatform 3D editor, also can edit videos it seems, but not tested.
• DVDVideoSoft Free Studio, a freeware set of multimedia programs (including convertors) for Windows. Read Wikipedia's Free Studio

Popular commercial editing sofware

Cheaper (< $100) systems

• Adobe Premiere Elements
• Video2x Video workshop and converter (not tested).

Medium-end popular systems, often referred to as the "A-Team"

• Avid
• Adobe Premiere
• Final Cut Pro (Apple)

Specialized commercial

• Software to create Movie Credits VideoTagger

Encoders, converters/transcoders

• Wikipedia's category of Video conversion software

Free encoders

• FireOgg is a Firefox plugin that can convert mp4 to to ogv and webm. Advanced option allows to parametrize codecs, i.e. video (size, framerate, aspect, quality, etc.) and audio quality
• MEncoder (Wikipedia) Free converter)
• XMedia-recode. Can handle most formats. Page in German, English version of software exists. Read the Wikipedia article
• Miro video converter Converts to mp4, ogg and webm.
• ffmpegx for MacIntosh
• SUPER, Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer. (see also the Wikipedia article).
• mplayerhq.hu - MEncoder and MPlayer, Win, Linux

Adware and nagware

• MediaCoder for Windows. Read Wikipedia's MediaCoder. Probably one of the best free programs, but you will have to cope with ad/nagware.

• Real Video Editor (convertor for some formats)

Unknown status

• Adobe Media Encoder (Win). This product comes with Flash and CS5 suites, but it looks like it can be downloaded (not tested).

Capturing monitor activities

Overviews

• screencasting (Wikipedia)
• Comparison of screencasting software

Free software (all sorts of licences)

• VLC Media Player Read VLC media player (Wikipedia). This is probably the best bet. The program is stable and includes many features, but then we are not experts - Daniel K. Schneider 12:45, 22 April 2012 (CEST)
• Camstudio. Read CamStudio (Wikipedia)
• Freeseer Project Home Page. Read Freeseer (Wikipedia)
• Jing, Read Jing (Wikipedia)
• Screenpresso. Read Screenpresso at Wikipedia.

Commercial

• Adobe Captivate
• Camtasia
• ... others (needs to be completed)

Other software

• FFmpeg (Wikipedia). Popular software project that is used in many other open source and commercial products.

• MediaInfo displays information about a video file. Read the Mediainfo Wikipedia article

• Gspot is another nice free tool that displays information about at video file. Unfortunately it is outdated (last upgraded in 2007 as of April 2012), i.e. it can't precisely identify new video formats