Home Editing Systems

We are often asked how you can edit your own home movies and Camcorder tapes once they have been transferred. There are a number of ways of doing this:

The best way is to have your cine transfered to Mini DV tape. Many home users have the facility with their home Mini DV camcorder to connect it to their PC. The footage can then be transferred and edited with the software that came with your camcorder home editing software / kit. As there are no variables with mini DV this is always the most successful way.

We can supply a DVD ROM, which will contain the raw Mpeg2 files (with .m2v extenstion), which would be used to author a finished DVD. We can also transfer straight to Apple quicktime (QT) if you are using iMovie or Final Cut. Many computer editing systems can read and edit such Mpeg2 files.

You can test to see if you can use .m2v files by downloading a sample silent vision only m2v file here. This is a copy of our Cine Demo reel that we send out to customers who wish to see the quality of our cine conversion service. It may take some time to download. This demo file should appear within Window Media player if you have the correct codecs installed. From here you can save the file to your hard drive. You can also right click on the download link and select 'Save Target As..' to save the download to your hard drive. .m2v files are the default export files of Abobe Premier and Apple Final Cut some other system use other file extentions.

Other downloadable example video file formats we can support can be found here. They are free for you to download to test if your home editing system is compatible with that file type.

Another format we can supply is AVI format files which are uncompressed and very, very large. Dependant upon the amount of footage it is unlikely that a DVD ROM would be large enough to transport this medium to you. We recommend the use of USB external hard drives for the delivery of such AVI files. Such drives would be supplied by you with the order. We can only fit about 15mins of high quality video on one DVD ROM in .avi format the frame size is 720x576. Check if your machine can handle files of above 2GB.

You will need to check if the editing software you are planning on using can read / edit either Mpeg2 or AVI files. I am sorry but we do not support users own computer software or advise upon suitable systems. As you can appreciate the variables and differences between systems and hardware requirements can be a nightmare.

We would supply the MPEG2 file with a .m2v extension. You may have to rename this to another valid MPEG2 extension before you can read it into your system.

You will also need to check to see if your computers hard drive has been formatted so that it can take large single files. A single MPEG2 file may be up to 4.7Gb in size. Check if your machine is formatted with FAT or NTFS. NTFS formatted drives can take the larger file types.

You would also need to check that you have all of the required codecs needed on your machine to read the MPEG2 file supplied.

If you already have experience of editing MPEG2 files and are aware of all the special requirements as stated above then an MPEG2 file would be an ideal editing format for you.

If you wish to use Apple iMovie to edit QuickTime files you may need to cut them down to size so as iMovie can read them. Some versions of iMovie have a file limitation size of 2gb when importing files, which is just of 9mins of footage. The apple site has two very good gpages which detail how you can get round this problem by using the QuickTime player to cut you clips down to size so as iMovie will import them. Please see:-

iMove File Limitation
Using QuickTime Play to cut your QuickTime files into chunks

Even with a finished DVD or video tape you can transfer the footage contained within onto your hard drive via a USB or card capture device. These devices can be in the form of video capture cards which must be fitted inside your computer or external USB devices which simply plug into your USB port. Once installed you simply connect the video output from your video or DVD player into the video input of the device. Such devices will come with suitable software for home editing. These devices can vary in price from £50 to several hundreds of pounds. Quality will also vary and you will need a suitable PC that is powerful enough to drive the editing system. With editing systems you get what you pay for.

Another method of editing a finalised DVD on a PC or MAC is by 'Ripping the DVD'. To do this you'll need what is known as 'Ripping Software'. To obtain software that will allow you to RIP a DVD, type 'DVD Ripping Software' into Google and see what is available. The once the DVD has been ripped you'll be able to copy the sound and vision tracks and turn them into the appropirate file type that you editing software uses. The DVD's that we produce for you don't have copy protection (Macrovision) or advances DES encrytion on them so it will be easy to do.

This company supply our PC based editing systems so if want something that will work give them a ring. We recommend Canopus for it's ease of use and stability. Digital Video Computing.