Which Movie Editing software do you use

A bit new to the whole scene, so I was wondering if you guys could give me some feedback. What is the best movie editing software in your opinon, what do most pople use (To put together scenes, add effects) and what is the best conversion software for AVI to MOV? Any advice / help concerning what would be the best to use would be great.

Thanks

My setup on Windows:
Raw capture - FRAPS
Editing - Adobe Premiere Pro
Special Effects - Adobe After Effects
Final render - Quicktime Pro, using h.264 as an mp4

Capture your video with FRAPS. Do your editing and compilation in Premiere. Export your final movie as an UNCOMPRESSED AVI. The resulting file will be HUGE, many gb at least. Open that file in Quicktime Pro and re-export it as an mp4 w/ h.264.

Windows Platform:

HyperCam3 for avi capture.
Sony Vegas for editing and special effects/overlays/masks etc.
AV4U compression application.
QuickTime Pro 7.1 for final review.

Best depends on your objective. Mine is to get lots of people makigf vids. So I favor cheap. To transcode to and from .mov, I use this:
http://www.avsmedia.com/VideoTools/index.aspx
Costs about $40
Also does editing and has features I occasionally use. But not my favorite editor.

This page:
http://www.thinkerer.org/Studios/StuFAQ.htm
has links to various kinds of low-cost support for vid making, inculding Audaticy, The Gimp, Fraps, Medimax, IshowU, and TeamSpeak.
There are also titorial pages on using Fraps, Windows Movie Maker, Audacity, the Gimp, and other vid related things.
TM

Mine are a touch on the expensive side...

Capture: Hypercam as an uncompressed avi
Edit: Avid Xpress Pro
Effects: After Effects or Houdini depending on the type of effect.

Hypercam doesn't seem to get as quality footage for me as FRAPS does. Any advice.

I had that same issue until I changed it to uncompressed and set the frame compression quality to 100% (default is 75%). You'd think if it's set to full frames (uncompressed) that the % box wouldn't matter, but it does.

Ill try that, thanks.

To prevent your captured footage looking like a Charlie Chaplin speeded up film, set Hypercam to 25 fps (which is equivelant to TV scanning to the naked eye) and make sure your system is up to capturing at 25fps, otherwise you will have dropped frames, and people will appear to be short tping everywhere.

My system is capable of capturing between 35-100+fps, which although sounding good, when it is rendered in Sony Vegas, it will set the fps to a constant, which can also cause frame drop... not enough frames and the programme attempts to 'tween' the lost elements and suddenly avatars start to appear to have 3-5 legs.

I think the fps should depend on which country you are in as the editing software will change it anyways. 25fps for PAL (euro) and 29.97 NTSC (US)

Final Cut..

Well actually no... unless you are going to show this on a TV screen, its irrespective. 25fps is all the human eye needs to preceive motion.

Well... 18fps is the perfect speed for motion. Which is what silent movies were made in. Animations are actually made in 12fps and each cell is doubled. The switch to 24fps was comprimise for the perfect fps for sound recording - 30fps.

While you can usually switch between pal and ntsc, if you capture with ntsc resolution at 25fps things will get a bit odd.

Besides with how easy it is to burn a dvd, why wouldn't you want to make one to show your friends? Why shoot yourself in the foot from the beginning to not be able to exhibit your work offline unless you convert it to the proper standards which then looses quality and can be expensive?

Try showing TV quality in SL... anyway.. 25fps will do for both PAL and NTSC as well.... once the movie is fully encapsulated, it will run smooth in both formats and play on DVD, TV and SL.. its a balance between resolution and fps.

Is there anything Open Source that's worth trying?

I mostly use VirtualDub with Avisynth scripts to do titling, scene transitions
and encoding.

Both open source, ie FREE.

As for converting AVI to MOV... Quicktime Pro is the best for this imho. But
it's commercial software. The current version is $29.99 at Apple's store:

Quicktime Pro v7.0

- Infrared