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Home videos are a fantastic way to preserve those special moments in life, but in practice they tend to be inordinately dull. The camera is left rolling in the hope that someone will do or say something vaguely interesting, but most of the time it doesn't happen. Get that raw footage inside your PC, however, and those rare gems can be edited into a far more entertaining spectacle. You can even add titles, transitions, effects and incidental music, then distribute your masterpiece to friends on a CD or over the Internet.

If you're tempted by the idea of PC video editing but you've never taken the plunge, now's your chance! This month the full version of Pure Motion's superb EditStudio 2 video editing software is on your cover CD. It even includes sample video clips for you to play with - just copy them from the CD-ROM onto your hard disk (you'll find them on the CD in full\editstudio2\movies and full\editstudio2\Tutorial\Tutorial\Media Files).

To edit your own footage, first you'll need to get it onto your PC, using a video capture card. For traditional analogue camcorders, any low-cost TV card should work - at £40, AverMedia's AverTV 203 is an excellent choice for 1GHz and faster PCs. Dedicated capture devices tend to be more reliable, though. Pinnacle's Linx costs £35, provides reasonable quality capture and connects via USB. Pinnacle Studio Deluxe costs £250, and offers immaculate quality capture plus FireWire sockets for perfect digital capture from MiniDV cameras. However, any FireWire card (from £30) will serve MiniDV camera owners equally well.

Author: Ben Pitt

Making Movies