Video editing, eight years later

I want Potential Gamer to be as ‘multimedia’ an experience as possible. Which in this day and age means lots and lots of video content – which so far has been conveniently provided by the likes of Gametrailers.com et al. However, once some proper original content appears (rather than just editorial on other people’s), such as the Multiwinia preview, I need to have some videos that I’ve created myself.

Easy, I thought. I’ve edited countless videos over the years. I’ve used Premiere and Final Cut, I’m about as familiar with VisionLab Studio as anyone can be, I know how to use AE to a basic level; generally I know what I’m doing.

And then it hit me: I don’t actually have any video software (FXhome stuff aside) on my home machine anymore. Sure, at work I’ve got access to all sorts, but I can’t always rely on access to that, nor can I go filling up the FXhome hard drives with random gaming videos. Unfortunately my old editing system, which once upon a time was pretty astounding, no longer functions thanks to a total lack of support from Pinnacle after about 2003. So my old hardware accelerated, super-sexy analogue/digital solution wasn’t an option anymore. Similarly, my old copy of Premiere 6.0 is somewhat ropey on Vista.

It was a bit like starting out all over again. Rather foolishly, I thought I’d give Windows Movie Maker a quick whirl, just on the off chance that Microsoft made a free product that actually worked. After all, presumably the entire point of WMM is to act as competition for Apple’s iMovie – in other words, to make PC plebs just as capable of creating edited holiday videos as their Mac brethren.

Alas, WMM turned out to be possibly the worst product I’ve ever used. Aside from the myriad other problems, it can only export to DV-AVI or WMV. You can’t export to any other AVI codec, despite the fact it’s the main video format on PCs…madness.

Thus I was stuck in a bit of a quandary. Premiere is a fair few hundred quideroonies, even if I upgrade from Premiere 6. Given that all I’m going to be doing is really basic editing and I’m still a long way from doing anything particularly advanced, it wasn’t worth the outlay.

On the FXhome forums all the kids rage about Sony Vegas, a product I’d always dismissed as being one of those tacky ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ editing solutions. Nevertheless, they offer a £50 version, so I thought I may as well check it out. Although for that price it can’t be particularly great, right?

Well…so far, so good. It’s a little non-standard in its layout and practises, but it does the job. It doesn’t seem too limited, and has fairly decent media support (although it seems oblivious to audio in FRAPS files, annoyingly). Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that the first PG video is now online – woot!

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