Our Next Meeting: Wednesday 18th December 2013
Gadgets and Party Evening - All Welcome

For our December meeting we are once again holding the annual gadgets evening. This is always a lighthearted look at any new gadgets and toys we have bought or been given during the year and does not have to be computer related with us seeing pineapple cutters, laser measuring devices and even a humble paper clip in the past!!

Our Last Meeting: Wednesday 20th November 2013 Video Editing -All

Peter brought along his Windows PC rig used for video editing largely in the same configuration as previous evenings with the two pieces of software he uses for editing video from his camera on holidays etc.

The first piece of software was called Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 (MEP) and Peter has been using this for some years having a few different versions. Newer versions are now available, but as Peter's PC is quite old he has stayed with an older version that is stable without pushing the hardware past its limits. The Magix software is available for ~£60. When Peter started using the software a few years ago it was quite flaky particularly when running long encoding sessions but these are now all resolved and it is Peter's preferred package.

Peter initially started out with Magix MEP when moving from manually editing using video recorders directly to using the PC. Having read reviews in a number of magazines Magix was recommended in it's price range as being quite sophisticated and offering value for money.

The version Peter currently uses is capable of dealing with HD and 3D video if the camera supports it. Peter uses the video mode on his digital still camera, which supports 720p video recording and is quite satisfactory. The limitation of this is that it cannot shoot continuously till the card is full. Peter has to plan ahead when recording in Church for instance because of this.

Magix MEP is quite sophisticated with a number of discrete video and audio tracks available with a user interface that would be familiar to users of other standard editing packages. Peter preferred this over iMovie on the Mac and others because of the fine grained detail available, allowing him to cut and splice clips down to the single frame level, very useful when joining together clips from multiple cameras shot at an event.

Magix MEP can also author the final video out in many formats, encoding to single files for the web or for DVD and Blu-Ray. Included is a designer for creating the menus on a DVD. Anne commented that she misses this on the Mac which used to be available in iDVD as Apple seem to be moving away from supporting physical media.

Peter was recently tempted by an offer and bought some additional editing software from Serif for £9.99. While we only looked relatively briefly at this towards the end of the evening it did look to have quite a lot of features for such a budget priced product, with a slightly simpler interface than Magix.

Anne brought along two discs that had been backed up by Frank using Acronis containing lots of photos that she would like to access again if at all possible. Michael volunteered to help as he has Acronis for backups at home and could hopefully recover the data.

Gareth

Since the meeting Peter has found some more Video Editing software for the Mac. Initially this is described as free, but like much downloadable "free" software these days discovered that the download and install are free but you only get a limited time (30 days) to try it out and that is for a cut-down version anyway. The full package is called Videopad Master's edition and costs $69.95 (£44.64) available from www.nch.com.au it does have quite a few features, but I haven't had much of a go with it yet.