Program for Putting Together Recordings

[MyLifeIsRandom]

I'm officially done with Windows Movie Maker, as it has frozen my computer and stopped working far too much for me to practically use. To that end, I am wondering if there is another program where I can just put clips together for posting on Youtube as a full movie. I don't need many bells and whistles, as I often just keep the original audio and don't require additions of my own. I was recommended by my dad to check Open Source for such a program, but I'm too dim-witted to navigate the site at the moment. Preferably this program would be free, or at least have a free trial so that I may see if I'd like to purchase it.

Any and all help is appreciated, thank you.

[Fuzzykins]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...are-Megathread

[vesseblah]

For editing home movies as well as WoW videos Sony Vegas HD 9 is definitely the best affordable option, open source video editing tools for Windows sucks donkey balls.

Free trial -> http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/.../moviestudiohd
Buy ($40) -> http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...tudiohd?disp=1

Version 10 is currently newest, but the biggest things missing from much cheaper 9 are improved HD camera importing features (not needed for game videos, can be worked around with opensource tools for home video work) and BluRay authoring.

[Cilraaz]

I use VirtualDub for all of my editing and encoding needs. Free and does the job well. You probably won't get any fancy effects out of it, but if you just want to cut/edit, it's as good as any... and free.

[vesseblah]

I use VirtualDub for all of my editing and encoding needs. Free and does the job well. You probably won't get any fancy effects out of it, but if you just want to cut/edit, it's as good as any... and free.

VirtualDub is good for what it's meant for, which is trimming the video from start and end, cropping and color correction, and then recompression. What it can't do is non-linear editing with multiple takes, or easy titling, or music composition from multiple sources, and many other things that people have gotten used to even with the simple WMM.

edit:

In my current workflow with boss kills I crop/resize in VirtualDub to 1920x1072 (for better youtube compatbility) and re-encode to lossless Lagarith format (takes as much disc space as raw fraps, sometimes even more) and then edit the lagarith-compressed files in Sony Vegas for simple multi-track cutting (most boss kill vids I've done during Cata have 2-3 povs) and doing some simple music/teamspeak mixing + title texts.

When video is done in Vegas, I render as lossless Lagarith and do final encode with RipBot264 (very easy tool meant for re-encoding anything with the x264 codec) as 2-pass h264 for best possible quality. Free x264 curiously has much better quality output than the AVC/h264 codecs that ship with Vegas.

Editing with Lagarith-encoded files because Vegas has major problems with raw fraps files, and something like mp4 is not an option because of the high CPU requirements (Vegas/i5-2500K can't play back three FullHD h264 streams in realtime for multitrack editing needs).

[berenzen]

I use AVS software myself, which does everything I need it to and more, it has a a free version as well, though it doesn't have as many bells and whistles.