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Wedding video help

P

Pop's Posse

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 27, 2008
8
0
Upstate NY USA
I just ordered a refurbished iMac 24" 2.4GHz with a 320gb HD (also ordered 4 gb of ram to install). I want to edit and do do a bunch of work on several DVDs that people have given me from video they took at my daugther's wedding. I would like to incorporate video and still shots to make a nice DVD or 2. I never used a Mac before, but bought this one because my PC would not handle the job. While trying to work with the PC on the project I bought a piece of software called Power Director 7. It continually crashed and that is when I decided it was time for the Mac.
My question is about one of the features that the software had that I liked. You could put an "overlay" over the video in sections that showed different effects. One that I liked was flower pedels drifting through the scene. Is there any way that this could be done with the software that comes with my Mac? There were other nice wedding effects that I would like to use but do not know where or how to do it. I would really like to do this with the software included in the Mac and not have to buy new programes unless it's the only way. I have to say that this will be my first attemt at anything like this so I really am a novice.
Thank you for any help.
Mike
 
N

NRose8989

macrumors 6502a
Feb 6, 2008
629
0
Handbrake should be able to pull the videos off of the DVD's that people gave you.

As for the video filters, I'm not sure if iMovie 08' has exactly what your looking for but it does have some effects filters, though I'm not sure what it does have because I've only used iMovie once or twice before moving to Final Cut.
 
treehorn

treehorn

macrumors 6502
Aug 21, 2007
467
0
The flower petal type effects would be in Motion, not IMovie I'm afraid (IMovie only has some titles and transitions in the 'motion video' department.
 
C

ChrisA

macrumors G5
Jan 5, 2006
12,581
1,697
Redondo Beach, California
iMovie will come with the Mac but it is limited in what it can do. Final Cut Express is far better but it has a rather steep learning curve and requires some study and reading.

What you really need to do is read up on editing. Not on how to use the software but on how to cut film. Once you learn what it takes to assemble some footage into a show that someone might want to watch then your need for "effects" will be greatly reduced.

If done "right" the editors work "disappears" and the viewer does not even see the cuts. It's realy odd when you think about it that a camera location can jump across a room and viewers don't notice but it you understand the theory and apply some simple rules it "just works".

If you are going to go much farther then simply abutting video segments together and culling out the crap with maybe music over the top then you should look into using a "real" multi-track editor. Then you can align a bunch of the tracks and maybe composit them through a mask for an effect like you describe.

BTW It would be best if you could obtain the source material rather than working from DVDs. You have to issues with generational loss as the video is converted between formats. If this was shot in (say) miniDV see if you can get those files.
 
P-Worm

P-Worm

macrumors 68020
Jul 16, 2002
2,045
1
Salt Lake City, UT
I would say to play around with iMovie a bit. You can make a really nice little movie without adding a whole bunch of effects to it. In my opinion, adding effects just ends up making the video look cheesy. Effects should be there to support the basic story that you are trying to tell, not be the source of interest.

P-Worm
 
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