Music and video editing for beginners

[Blackcat]

Well, I am not an expert in this, but I have been doing some video editing and a lot of sound editing. so here are some tools that may help ya:

AVIDEMUX

http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

Avidemux is an open-source program designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing, it has windows and Linux versions. It edits AVI, MPEG, ASF (Windows media player format) and MP4, with a great number of codecs. It  easy to use and enables "copy and paste".

AUDACITY

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audacity is a free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD. Is the number one free tool for editing audio, but I highly recommend you covert the audio to WAV first before editing.

IWISOFT FREE VIDEO CONVERTER

http://www.easy-video-converter.com/

The name may not be great, but if one of the programs of its type that converts videos, that's a FREE AND EFFECTIVE alternative to pay programs.

Other programs:

aTube Catcher

While not safe (Be careful on what you click while installing that program) and not the best option to download youtube vids (Use Jdownloader for that, but again, be careful on the program installation) that program includes a very easy to use video conversion tool, good idea to extra audio from a short video (It tends to go bonk with videos larger than ten minutes) or convert a youtube video to another format.

Hey blackcat, how I extract audio from a rm file for free?

The only free way is to disable all windows sounds, close any program that might do noise, play the file and record the sound with Audacity, then you save the audio file as wav, edit it a bit and you are done. Other way is to use one of those video conversion tools that put a watermark in the video, simply convert the video to avi, and then extract the audio of the avi as wav.

One last advice, be careful, most video utility tools out there are dangerous.

[Methid Man]

I've looked up a list of good alternatives to Windows Movie Maker that are free, and Avidemux is often the first one mentioned. Now that I've seen it mentioned again, I guess it's safe enough for me to trust it.

Just one question: does Avidemux allow you to splice videos together? See, I have a few videos that I downloaded from Youtube through RealPlayer but many of them are split. Could I merge those together?

-- Sam the Methid Man

[Blackcat]

I generally use TMPGEnc to splice videos together, I just convert them to good old mpg, then splice them in one huge video file with TMPGEnc, then covert the file using VirtualDub to avi with a codec so it doesn't end as a huge avi file, then edit. But then you should check it yourseft as it seems avidemux can do it.

Here is the guide

http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php

[Someone who does Something]

Do you know a good free screen capture program?

[Blackcat]

Do you know a good free screen capture program?

You need to be more specific, you want to just take screen captures or actually record what is happening in your desktop? For the first case IrfanView and vlc media player work okay. In the second case I know a few programs but they are for Linux.

[Someone who does Something]

Yeah, it's record stuff, I'm trying to contribute to PCisoZone by recording footage of how well Win3.1 games run in Win3.1 in dosbox,
I use Windows XP.

[Blackcat]

Well, I know a few, VidShot Capturer, ObserveIT Xpress , oRipa Screen Recorder, Grabilla for screenshot and screencast, Free Screen Recorder and SCREEN2EXE.

But I would try CamStudio first since is open source, so is less likely to have junk/virus/spyware in it.

http://camstudio.org/