stuart test blog

When Flickr announced their new video service that allows you to store your videos in-line with your photos, I thought it was time to start processing all the videos that we’ve taken of Elliot over the last 10 months and start posting them online.

Turns out that video editing and processing is a lot harder than I first expected.

The first thing I did was start up Windows Movie Maker on my Vista notebook, expecting it to be a complete breeze. Came across a showstopper pretty quickly – Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support the MPEG2 videos from our Sony Video Recorder. It’s not like it’s an uncommon format or anything, so it’s annoying that there’s no support built in. I also found out later that the MPEG4 videos from my Nokia N95 are also not supported by Movie Maker. Not impressed.

So I then started some research into video editing software – I was hoping to find a good freebie that would do the job, but was also willing to pay for something if needed. After much research and downloading, I finally was deciding between Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere Elements.

I preferred the interface of Vegas as it was quite advanced but also dead simple to use, so it makes you feel like a pro. The interface in Premiere Elements is also nice, but more in a pretty, child-like way.

Both seemed to do the same sorts of things, but Premiere Elements had better options for exporting videos, whereas the Sony software tried to trick you into using their own online service for uploading videos to the Internet.

But the Premiere Elements trial was super annoying because you couldn’t export videos without a huge banner overlaid on the video saying that it was produced by a trial version of the software. The Sony software had no such limitations, and I almost bought the Sony software for that reason alone.

But I went for Adobe’s Premiere Elements in the end because it was the only software that I could use to export my videos in widescreen format without the letterbox bars and without the videos looking stretched. (I also learned a lot about the differences between square pixels and PAL and NTFS sized videos along the way.)

I actually bought the Adobe Elements bundle which also includes Photoshop Elements as the interface looked the same as Premiere so I thought it would be easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first video from Premiere Elements. I haven’t actually done any editing on it as I was just pleased enough that the size came out right. A nice feature about embedding videos from Flickr is that you can choose the size of the video when embedding.