I would like to thank Heaven for Microsoft. Yes, yes, yes, we're bashing it one day and love it another.
Well today I am [temporarily] totally and wholeheartedly in love with Microsoft for its Windows Movie Maker. At this point in time I have spent about 2 days attempting to process video files from my camera. What I needed was simple — grab files, stitch some, remove portions of some, and that is it. Nothing advanced.
Pinnacle Studio that I have has been fantastic program, except it doesn't like files from my new camera — .mov. Having tried literally a couple of dozen of various video editors and converters, open source and closed source, I have arrived nowhere. It is either files are being converted in PAL system, which are unacceptable by Pinnacle Studio or these newly converted files are crashing Pinnacle Studio.
At one point, I was so frustrated that I wanted to give up. But I realised that memories are expensive and that gave me more strength to research on what to do. Somewhere online I came across long forgotten Windows Movie Maker and decided to give it a try. Even that isn't easy. You have to install Windows Update, turns Auto Updates 'On', etc. But I got to the actual file on download.com and that was it! I finally had a program that was accepting my files.
Finally, there is one but! Windows Movie Maker does not accept .mov files. I found a simple and easy to use program — Prism — that converts .mov to .wmv.
To sum up, the workflow to process and stitch my .mov file is as follows:
- Convert
.movfiles to.wmvfiles using Prism. - Edit video files using Windows Movie Maker, can be download on either microsoft.com or download.com
It's unfortunate that there's no one tool that handles everything. So hopefully this could be useful to someone.
p.s. all aforementioned software is free.