Video Editors and Creating Software

[Linda Enever]

We have a client who is looking for a video editor that is simple for them to use and gives them great effects. They are not wanting to go as far as Adobe and want a step or 2 up from Movie Maker can anyone help on this one for me?

[JakeThomas]

Hi Linda,

Wouldn't have the foggiest myself, but I posted it on our Facebook & Twitter and one of our followers (Interim Business Solutions) said:

"What about Camtasia? I've not used it myself but have heard lots of good things. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html"

[v2Media]

Camtasia is a good product - if you know it's strength and weaknesses.

Camtasia was developed for recording your desktop, not capturing video from cameras. The video codecs used are proprietary as well. So anything captured in Camtasia has to be processed by Camtasia for final output.

The export options for making final movie files in Camtasia are also robust for a consumer level product. However you also have to know what you're doing. It's easy to export your project into a single file and burn to disk or publish as a streaming video. However you have to consider things like bandwidth and the amount of RAM available on the device playing the final movie. Make the wrong decisions and the movie may be unplayable to 99% of computers out there. This applies to any video editing suite too.

Publishing movies for streaming over the internet, playing from CD/DVD, and locally on a hard drive will all have dramatically different publishing options.

I would recommend a package developed for video capture, editing and publishing. My choices, in order of preference, would be:-

1) Cyberlink Power Director
2) Adobe Premiere Elements (consumer version of Premiere Pro)
3) Corel Video Studio Pro

[Linda Enever]

Thanks for your help