Video making Q&A

With the recent launch of the video making contest, I'm sure many people have started recording or thinking up ideas for submissions. Now, getting from "having an idea for a video" to "mashing the render button in your editing program of choice" can be tricky sometimes if you aren't very experienced with the whole video making process.

I've been making videos for years now, and I still learn new things almost every time I run my editing program - so I'm making this thread to give whatever help I can involving video capture/editing to those that need it. Feel free to ask any questions you have in this thread and I'll (hopefully) be able to answer it.

For now though, the basics:

To make a video for this contest you will need a video capturing program. There are a variety of these out there, some of them being free. Here is a list of a few that immediatly come to mind:

www.fraps.com (free trial available, which limits you to 30 second max length clips and puts a small watermark at the top of the screen. Watermark is easy to crop out, though. This program will cost you $$$ to get the full version of)

www.xfire.com (This is a program that a lot of people use that isn't really specifically designed to be a video capturing program, but just so happens to have one built in. It is free. Outside of messing around with the program for a few minutes I don't really have any experience with this one.)

http://www.planetgamecam.com/ (This is much like fraps in that a free version is available alongside a full version that will cost you 30 dollars. I have no experience with this program.)




Ok, so you've got your editing program. The next thing you need to do is fire it up, start perfect world, and begin recording your masterpiece. Typically, you will assign a hotkey that will start and end recordings (Mine is the insert key). Whenever you end a recording session, an uncompressed video file will be placed into the folder that your video editing program is located. For instance, if you're using Fraps, it will go into the "Fraps" folder under whatever drive you installed it to.

WARNING! uncompressed movie files are HUGE! I would highly recommend that you have LOTS of free hard drive space if you plan on recording a large amount of stuff.

Alright then. So you've recorded your stuff, now you want to start editing. The easiest program to use for this is definitely windows movie maker. Every computer that uses windows (and probably even those that don't) should have this in their start > programs menu. In order to get to your movie files through WMM youll need to click the "import video" button that's under the "capture video" tab on the left side of your screen.

From there on out it's up to you with how to arrange them and what effects to use. It's a very easy to use program, so if you're just starting in the movie making world I would highly recommend it (I used it myself for awhile when I made my first few videos b:victory)

Most people that know their video editing stuff will probably be using some version of Sony Vegas. Consider Vegas the next step (and ultimately the end game) for video editing. It is vastly more complex than WMM, but allows editors a much larger array of effects and editing tools. This program is not free. To get an official version will cost you anywhere from 50 dollars to nearly 600. BUT! You can download a 30 day trial HERE that is fully useable and unrestrictive. A month should be more than enough time to get in, make your contest winning video, and then get out before it expires on you.

PHEW, ok, that's a lot of words. Basically this OP is to help out people completely new to video making. But please ask any and all questions about the subject in this thread and I (or some other editing mastermind) will answer them and help out as much as possible.

Good luck!