Video editing.

[Alderaan]

Basically looking for some tips or tricks to edit video's as simply as possible. I've never had issues working with Premiere before, but recently i keep running into and issue where i import an avi and only the first 2min of the movie shows up. I'm sure i'm doing something wrong as this is supposed to be one of the best consumer options.

I've also tried using Sony Vegas but i run into the same issue with avi's where the audio isn't imported for some reason. I've sereached forums and even youtube for fixes for this and none of them seem to work. The only one that sorta did was converting avi's in dirtualdub first, but then i have audio and video out of sync.

Unfortunately the only success i seem to have is using Movie Maker, which doesn't have an h.264 output, so my vids turn out terrible.

Any recommendations for software or tips on what i may be doing wrong is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[nicholai]

If you have a Mac Final Cut Express/pro are really solid tools and they can be obtained pretty easily. I really like AVID for editing on my laptop and my editing machine. I've never come across any issues with audio not importing so I can't be of much use in that area other than you might want to not do anything else on the machines if it's a huge file you're importing cause it could just be those programs having issues with multitasking if the machine you're on is not up to par or something.

As far as editing goes, there are a ton of youtube vids for tutorials and such for every program out there for pretty much whatever you want to do. But I would say if you're a beginner keep it simple try to to add to many layers on or cut up the video a bunch or it will end up looking really choppy and silly with a bunch of transitions. Also if you have a good amount of video story-boarding is really helpful if you're making a longer video or even a shorter one but have a decent amount of content to use, and will help you stay on track with the video.

If you have any other questions feel free to give me a yell, I'm a bit out of practice but would love to help and feel like my production/editing degree was not going to waste completely.

[Gulkeeva]

What are you using to record?

Also you may try breaking apart Your recordings to 1 (or 2 forgot) GB segments (some programs have trouble handling 4Gb+ segments)

[Blabj]

Transcode using something like MPEG Streamclip into a more edit friendly format. You'll have to check online for what your preferred editing program prefers... I know for Final Cut it uses ProRes.

Almost all NLEs don't play nice with distribution format codecs (especially h264...) because of all the optimisations these codecs make to make them playback as smoothly as possible under the constraints of bandwidth and hardware...

[Alderaan]

What are you using to record?

Also you may try breaking apart Your recordings to 1 (or 2 forgot) GB segments (some programs have trouble handling 4Gb+ segments)

Oh not recording, using mostly clips/vids already on my HD. Vegas doesn't like avi's and I'm having weird issues with Premiere where it doesn't load the entire video, only the first 2 min. On my timeline i can see the entire length on the video, but when i scroll forward to certain parts i want to clip, it's like it only shows the first 2 min of video.

To answer the other question, most of my video files are around 1gig or smaller, being as most of them are avi's.

[Firedemon]

I've always used Final Cut Pro and loved it. Never really had a problem with it.