Movie making software

[Ken Ibold]

My son is very interested in video production, and I am encouraging it as a money-making venture. In schools these days it seems like every activity is documented photographically by the parents, who turn the digital photos over to you and then love to buy end-of-season DVDs that are essentially slide/video shows put to music. Selling 50-100 disks at $5 or $10 a pop is a decent part time job for a 12 year old. (At one event, a parent who saw the presentation but didn't know DVDs were for sale for $5 offered $50 for a copy!)

Up to now, he's been using the Windows Movie Maker software bundled with Windows -- and getting decent results. Just curious what software those of you who are movie makers are using.

 

[tonycondon]

When I was in high school, we used PowerBooks with the standard iSomething Movie software. Worked pretty good for our video productions. Im sure the uber nerds here will suggest something far superior and much cheaper...

 

[wsuffa]

Pinnacle Studio.

It works better than anything else I've tried.

 

[Ken Ibold]

Pinnacle Studio.

It works better than anything else I've tried.

Bill, the reviews I've read are scathing about its instability. But then someone suggested that the problem might be with those whose computers use AMD chips instead of Intel. (All of our computers happen to be Intel.) What has your experience been WRT the software crashing, and what version do you have?

 

[gkainz]

Avid had a free version of their professional package a few years ago. My son-in-law is a video producer for TV network shows and said that it was one of the more common professional packages found in a lot of studios. It's not the easiest package to use, but might be worth looking into. My son has been doing video for the church youth group for a couple of years and he uses iLife for quick, little stuff and Final Cut for the higher quality stuff.

 

[wsuffa]

Bill, the reviews I've read are scathing about its instability. But then someone suggested that the problem might be with those whose computers use AMD chips instead of Intel. (All of our computers happen to be Intel.) What has your experience been WRT the software crashing, and what version do you have?

I don't have the latest version. I have vers 8 (might have upgraded to 9, but it's on the other computer and I'm in the middle of something else right now....). It's worked fine for me, a tad slow rendering it to a DVD, but I don't use it heavily. Intel processor with 1.5 GB of memory.

Pinnacle is now owned by Avid, which is a leader in commercial video production equipment. So, I'd expect feature-creep (with potential issues). Haven't looked at or upgraded to latest version in a while.

 

[jesse]

Bill, the reviews I've read are scathing about its instability.

IME with it..Instability is a pretty common issue. But it's not the end of the world ..just make sure you have plenty of memory.

But then someone suggested that the problem might be with those whose computers use AMD chips instead of Intel. (All of our computers happen to be Intel.)

That someone probably does not know what they are talking about. This is a case where a user knows just enough to be dangerous and likes to play the guessing game.

 

[wsuffa]

Ken, I checked, I'm running version 8. No stability issues.