Which hardware are you using for editing on? Has it been successful? Is it lacking in Ooomph? What do you reccomend for the budget concious buyer?

To the budget concious film maker (I prefer to spend nothing!) MS Moviemaker has to be the editting software of choice. Infact it is the one for me even if I had to pay for it...

So long as the footage/rushes is captured at a reasonable size (High Quality Video Large) students can take home their masterpieces and work on them as homework on a relatively small memeory stick. Just make sure the project file and footage are saved in the same folder!

i totally agree; moviemaker's a great way to get started with basic projects, but i've been working on an apple mac using final cut pro recently, which i think is great...there's a lot more freedom with what you're able to do; layering, multiclip, greenscreen etc. (a similar program for a pc is adobe premier elements)

this is harder to transport though - it's best just to stay on the one machine, as rushes capture as avi files by default, and all media has to be reconnected.

A very simple and cheap way to make a Film for Learning is with a digital stills camera and either MS Photostory 3 or Ms Moviemaker 2. Both pieces of software are available as a free download from the Microsoft site. Plus the software interface will be familiar to office users. I like the versatility of the panning and zooming movement options in MS Photostory... you can save the movie and import it into Movie maker as a source file.

The hardware you are editing on can make all the difference when it comes to rendering a piece you have spent hours on, if you are using an Intel Pentium 2, windows 98 based computer or and Apply Imac G3 533MHz or similar you may have problems with speed and stability during output and rendering.

I'd recommend that you use a system that has a newer processor (pentium 4, centrino - maybe, any duo or dual core processor) running at at least 1.7 GHz, and a newer operating system either Windows XP or Vista. In my opinion XP is far better but as time goes on Microsoft are adding to the features and fixing the bugs in Vista, so maybe it will overtake XP in months to come!

However if you're using a mac then I'd recommend that you have at least a G4 but my personal recommendation is a MacBook Pro or a newer iMac.

As far as RAM goes I suggest at least 512 MB ram (256 will do in most cases) but basically, the higher the better.

Dell systems are probably your most cost effective windows systems you can purchase at the moment, also be sure to check the PC World website from time to time, they have good offers on computers and laptops most of the time.

 Check out my software recommendations on the software forum,

If you would like specific help for your system you can reply to me here or at: 

bling-up-my-hardware@MateSpaces.net (for software use:) only-the-best-for-me@MateSpaces.net

Roan "hardware" D

yes I agree with everything on here so far but one item you have missed out on Roan is Linux. There's lots of editions out there that are cut out for Multimedia applications for example 64Studio. One pro about linux is that most of the content on it is open source as linux itself is mostly open source. My reccomendation as a Windows & Linux user would be they are both great for editing but Linux doesn't use much RAM so there's more for the whole editing process itself. So on the topic of Hardware if you have a higher enough spec computer you could dual boot if not then put it on an old computer to try out or keep for perminent and use and you could even invest in a KVM.

Sorry if it is a tad off subject.

Jorden