Haha. Never edited something before (well I cut something in the program that came with my Flip, as that was all I wanted to do with it..).
However, my dad asked me to put some holiday videos on DVD, again no real editing required, but still.. It's enough for me to be able to join in the moaning .
First, I used the software that came with the camera, I thought it would be best. Burned DVD works on my computer, but not in standalone player. Maybe a fluke, but.. And the software is so goddamn slow. I've never seen such a piece of crappy software before. Made me relive my days behind my old P300 computer, it was that bad.
Then I downloaded Windows movie maker. Simple, but quick and easy, for as far as I could see. The problem is, the camera (or the SD card rather) holds hundreds of small files, which the proprietary software combines into more managable chunks. But Movie maker can't import the original files. Also, let me say my dad can't film shit, he films everything where he should've taken photographs, resulting in loads of meaningless few-second videos. I can't be arsed to manually import hundreds of files which aren't in chronological order because Movie maker doesn't read the timestamps. I did do a test with a video from my Flip, burned on a DVD, and that worked fine on the standalone DVD player, so I'm assuming it's the software's fault.
After leaving it for a while, I try again. This time, I realise not only do I have a backup of the original files, I also have the way more managable imported files on my computer. I finally try to import these into Movie maker.. But the program breaks down. I think it can't handle 200+ files.
Then I remembered looking at other video editing software, most of which I can't afford , but I came across Lightworks which has a opensource version nowadays. Overkill for what I try to do, but whatever. Unfortunately, it doesn't import the camera files, or even the imported camera files. I'm not sure what it is.. Perhaps because it's opensource and accepts less formats than its prior commercial version. Still, as far as I can tell, it shouldn't have problems with MPEG2, but maybe I'm missing some subtleties.
Anyway.. I guess I should try the Lightworks forum and a tech forum for this problem . In the meantime, I'll try that crap software again, let's see if my patience holds out.