Move over, Spielberg (and Best Buy stinks!)

When we went to Chicago I bought a disposable camcorder from the pharmacy up the road. It cost about $20 and held about 20 minutes of video. When we got back I took the thing back to the pharmacy and they burned my footage onto a DVD for around $13.

Next came the fun part. With the DVD in the computer I could use the Movie Maker program included with XP to pull the footage apart into scenes and then put them together into the order I wanted, add transitions, background music, text, titles, and credits. With it all edited up I copied the file to my office laptop, which has a DVD burner, and I bought a 5-pack of blank DVD-R disks. The result is hardly Hollywood quality but as a first attempt it ain't bad and it's certainly better than I thought I'd be able to do myself.

All this goes to show that even just using a $20 throw-away camcorder and free software, it's not hard to put together something that's just a bit special.

Kate and I love movies and we've always thought it'd be great to make our own but while I've thought on occasion about buying a movie camera I'd always thought that making something more than just family home movies required expensive equipment.

Kate bought me a camcorder for my birthday. I was stunned. Since then I've messed about with it a little and got enough footage to be able to experiment with.

The first lesson I learned was that Windows Movie Maker is fine for simple work but it's extremely basic; it won't let you overlay one piece of video with another, for example, and more advanced stuff like green-screen is out of the question. I needed something better.

I bought a copy of Roxio's VideoWave 7. That went back to the store the next day, because after you've used it a few times the Media Manager program (needed to manage your scenes and takes) apparently corrupts its own data files and you have to re-install only to have the same thing happen later. Staples refunded my cash and the store manager was very interested in what I had to say about the program.

Next, I tried Magix Movie Edit Pro 10. This program was better, although it does some weird stuff on the screen as it starts up. Then I found that it won't handle a video file longer than about two and a half minutes - at that point on playback the image goes black although the sound continues. Magix didn't have a fix so that went back to the store too - Fry's, this time, who at first gave me a hard time about refunding opened software but eventually did the right thing.

Then I bought Pinnacle's Studio Plus 10 from Best Buy. This was a bad move on both counts. The program crashes when doing the simplest things. There are many, many posts on Pinnacle's consumer webboards saying that many, many people are having problems with this program. Pinnacle are apparently working hard to fix the problems but in the opinion of many including me, Pinnacle should never have put this product on shelves without a bunch more testing than they did.

Best Buy won't refund on open software (BASTARDS!). This together with the attitude of the w@nker in charge of customer 'service' at the Plano Best Buy has determined that I will never buy so much as a battery from Best Buy again. Pinnacle won't refund either (BASTARDS!), even though they know this program is crap, which means that I will never buy their products again either.

I finally got Sony's Vegas Movie Studio and at last have something that's worth the money.

Last weekend we drove down to San Antonio for the Texas Reptile Expo show and I got a chance to get some serious footage. The plan is to edit the material into a documentary and then post it somewhere and put a link on Kate's Animal Realm blog. I'm planning on getting started on the editing tonight. Watch this space...