Camera, action! Movie-editing on your desktop

You have the digital camcorder, so the next step is to edit your own movies. Charles Arthur takes a look at the best free software to make it happen

Last week I looked at a variety of digital camcorders, which all do a good job of capturing stacks more film footage than you'd ever want to inflict on anybody who wasn't a close relative or sworn enemy. What to do? Obviously, edit it down into story-sized chunks on your computer.

While there are plenty of paid-for programs out there to do this, if you're anything like me you'll find that money is a bit short for actually buying software. It will all, or largely, have gone on the hardware

For a start, you need to get the video into your computer. That needs a Firewire (or I-Link or IEEE1394) port, which has been standard on Apple machines since January 1999. But not on most PCs. So that's between £50 and £100, depending on whether you get a PCI or laptop plug-in card. USB 2.0 won't do – the processor overhead of USB can lead to dropped frames.

Then there's storage. Digital video needs a lot of space – in its raw form, about 3.7Mbyte per second of video. Each minute of video you download on to your machine needs 220Mb. Five minutes of raw data is a gigabyte. If you work on many different projects at once, your hard drive will rapidly fill up. So unless you're certain your main hard disk is vast and empty, buy yourself extra storage: an add-on Firewire disk will be another £200 for about 80Gb. And finally, the cable to connect the camera to the Firewire port costs £25.

After that, I didn't feel like splashing out on an editing program, too. Happily, both Microsoft and Apple provide free programs to let you edit your footage, and add such between-scene trickery as dissolves, crossfades, soundtracks, narration and titles. Apple's is called iMovie; Microsoft's is Windows Movie Maker.

Apple's product is still the gold standard for these sort of things, and it's easy to see why. It doesn't blind you with spurious information about frame rates or other stuff. You plug a DV camera into the computer, and control the playback and capture of the film; scene changes are detected automatically to produce clips that go on to a "shelf". You can then chop them up, dump unnecessary sections, and drag and drop them up on a linear timeline, adding transitions between scenes such as dissolves, fades, or shifts (all supplied) and titles (scrolling, rolling, static, and so on).

You can also add a music track or narration, and various special effects (slow or fast-motion, backwards, sepia, black and white). You'll discover that what you really want in these products is for the technicalities to get completely out of the way. It takes ages producing even a short film that's worth watching; finding the story in your footage can be the biggest challenge. The rest is mostly mechanics.

Once you've got your finished product, you can export it in QuickTime – Apple's digital media format – or back out to the camera as digital video (to produce a VHS tape), to a DVD burner (so you can send a DVD to your relatives), or in reduced size to the Web (fast connection recommended). Easy as pie.

Windows Movie Maker looks so familiar after iMovie – even down to the layout – that one suspects imitation: the shelf, the import, drag, chop, edit. The original version can't export back to a camcorder, though, only into proprietary Windows Media Player formats. The new beta (which will eventually be part of a service pack) can, and has more transitions and title effects than iMovie.

That's nice, but in creativity, ease of use counts for a lot more. Even in the new beta version, the interface is cluttered by displaying where the files you're editing actually live – about the last thing you care about when you're trying to decide whether the footage of the sandcastle dissolving in the waves should go at the start or the end, running forward or backward.

Of course, the real point of making these films is to share them with people. But even Movie Maker 2 can't burn on to a DVD without third-party software – a serious omission. And when I wanted to look at some of the "cool sample movies" made with Movie Maker 2 Beta, my version of Windows Media Player wasn't new enough. A slight obstacle to sharing, that; Apple's Quicktime products were more backwards-compatible, even if Quicktime is also a proprietary format.

It's inescapable that if you've got the camcorder but not yet the computer, you'd do better with an Apple. To those gazing at the Windows Start menu, this may sound rather like the remark that "I wouldn't try to get there from here". But it seems worth pointing out that with Microsoft, there are times when you're settling for second-best, even among things that are free.

www.apple.com/imovie; www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/ moviemaker/