Hi Jack,

Maybe I've misunderstood, but I'm not clear what you mean by 'batch processing' clips in the context of editing video clips. As you'll have seen from your use of MS MovieMaker, multiple clips can be selected before aplying changes. That's true of all video editors AFAIK.

As shown here
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/MEP-EditingClipsJack-1.jpg

I've selected two sound clips and I can now simultaneously delete them, change their volume, etc. Is that what you mean by 'batch processing'? Similarly, I could make some changes collectively to a multiple selection of video objects, or to both video and audio, such as fading their starts and ends, etc.

There are other changes I might want to make, such as adding effects, which are usually applied to individual clips, and that normally makes sense. You wouldn't necessarily want to raise the brightness or contrast of all your village clips by exactly the same degree, for instance.

@John: Morning John. We must have both been composing our replies at around the same time, in my case while eating breakfast!

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

@Terry

Good afternoon - hope the corn flakes didn't get in the keyboard .  It always surprises me at work what we find in them - the best so far has been bits of chocolate hobnobs.

Jack is taliking about batch conversion and removing the sound track at the same time - I understand he has been using other software to do the conversion and then using MS moviemaker to remove the sound. 

I assume the conversion is necessary so that MS MM can import the file - is this correct Jack?

John

Wow! Thanks Terry & John!!! By "batch processing" I did mean working with multiple clips--carry-over from my days as a programmer in COBOL, AS/400 CL & RPG....

As I think I mentioned, I developed and maintain the web site for the small village in which we live in Western New York state, USA. This year, in addition to the regular still photos I take at every event, I started recording some video as well--Quite a bit of video, as it turns out. My digital camera takes pretty decent video but the sound is of poor quality so I want to remove it and replace it with some "finished" music, also edit and combine the clips into 5-7 minute segments, upload them to YouTube and embed them on our site, as I currently do with stills on photobucket.com. 

The free utilities I've been using for that will only remove the sound from one clip at a time which is pretty time consuming. MS Movie Maker (the Windows Live version, anyway) to me is a little clunky and has some idiosyncracies. 

Just thought Movie Edit might be a better alternative as I have been using Xara/Magix products for years and love them! Don't know why I didn't think about the trial.  Had surgery on my foot a few days ago. Guess the painkillers are getting to me.....

Thanks again!!

Jack

Hi Jack,

You can definitely import all of your video clips into Movie Edit Pro, un-group the audio from the video and delete the audio track, but why do that?  The audio provides some "ambience"  why not just reduce the audio volume on the audio track and put the music sound track in at a higher level.  It will give your video more of a "live feel" instead of a somewhat sterile slide show feel.  Just my opinion.

George

Thanks, George! I thought about that, too, but I'll just have to see. A lot of the video is from our summer "Concerts in the Park" series and the audio is pretty brutal and, because of the time disparity between clips, it's pretty disjointed. 

There are a few whose audio I'll definitely keep because at our annual Family Picnic this past Sunday, we had a couple of guys take turns at the mic to serenade us. It was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I was on the other side of the park at the water balloon toss and missed their duet. But I got their solo performances, at least!

I'm going to dive into that this weekend to hopefully have it "out there" by the first of the week.

Thanks again for the advice & have a good weekend!!

Jack

Hey Jack,

If this is really important, I have a lot of experience fixing really bad audio tracks and would be happy to help out if that would help your project.  I will give you my personal email if you want to contact me via private message.

Hi

For adding 'atmosphere' I do one or more of the following:

1.   Make an audio recording of the general area eg in my favourite German town - Trier - their is a church in the market square with a magnificent set of bells which are rung for 15 mins on a Sunday morning. I recorded the entire 'sequence' and then used this as a background sound for the video/images of the town section of the movie.

2.  Use Atmospheres Deluxe to create various background sounds eg sea lapping against the beach, seagulls etc for videos for a video including scenes from Whitby (IMHO the most picturesque fishing town in the UK) - the original background audio had traffic sounds and needed to be replaced but keep some 'originality'.

3.  Use free audio loops available from the Internet.

John