Hey Guys & Gals,

Firstly, i am very new to all of this, so please forgive me if these seem like very basic questions, but if you could give me your advice, i would appreciate it very much.

OK id like to learn to edit my own videos and create half-decent family dvd's out of my work, i have done some research and purchased Power Director as my software of choice.

I have captured some footage which i done in HD, with a resolution of 1920x1080 however when viewing the footage on my computer, it is very jumpy. In all honesty i expected it due to the high res and the HD factor, however its no good for me to use to 'learn' how to edit videos.

I have a brand new laptop which i am using for this, which has 2gb of ram, 2.4ghz dual core athlon, so i have to work with what i have got.

I am assuming i need to some how convert this video so the res is smaller, or something. can anybody advise on what i need to do to just allow me to use the footage i have already captured to have a play around with Power Director, and if im serious about wanting to edit videos, i can then build a custom-built PC specifically for this.

If you could point me in the right direction, or give me any 'starter tips' i would really really appreciate it.

Thanks guys
Andy

If your videos are kinda jumping, probably it's your computer or your video player, how is the image when you watched it on tv ? .
Try using a different player and see how it looks, hd files are hudge so try just to capture a small parte of your footage to see how it looks if it looks better then either it is your player or computer .



Visit my portuguese blog :
VÃ*deo Digital

Your laptop spec is certainly up to the job, what software are you using to view the captured footage or are you just viewing in Power Director?

I'd load the footage into power director & without editing or anything (for now) export it to a movie, however PD does that, you can prob select DVD, avi, mpeg etc. Do that & check that that plays back okay, then you can go back to PD & start editing.

hey guys,

thanks for getting back to me. firstly im really glad to hear my laptop is up to the job. i really did think that it wouldnt be powerful enough to edit videos etc so thats a bit of good news for me.

OK, yeah i have watched the footage on a TV and the quality is perfect. its not jumping, plays fine and quality is brilliant. I have tried watchinng the footage on my computer using Windows Media Player, Adobe Quick Time, and ive even tried watching it when its imported into Power Director.

In all three programs the footage is very jumpy which is why i concluded it must be the laptop at fault, but you guys are the experts. What do you think?

thanks again for your help.

Dunno why your getting stuttery playback.

I can play HD Video fine on my old lappie with 512GB Ram & a Pentium 4, 3.2 GH CPU.

Stating the obvious really but make sure nothing CPU intensive is running in the background, virus check, any kind of scanning software?

Media Player wise I'd go grab yourself a copy of videolan, just google it, it doesn't have the flashiest of interfaces but it plays more or less everything you chuck at it. So grab that & run your video through that, any better?

Mind you if you are watching your captured video though power director, which I presume uses a small preview window & your video is jerky even then, then I am stumped.

Maybe a conflicting codec, maybe lots of frames were dropped when you captured the video?

Only thing I could suggest is to run your video through virtualdub (mpeg) & to convert it down to another format, xvid, divx, wmv etc.
But getting into re-encoding can be a bit of a learning step, mind you if you want to get into video editing then it's one you should take.

Hope this helps a bit, have a look at VideoHelp.com - Forum, Guides, Tools and hardware lists which has tonys of guides on this, that & the other

How big is your video file, in a 12gb file even good computers would have difficult in playing it in real time and see if you don't have anyother applicattion running , like antivirus .
Also
Also try vlc or mplayerc , they are both free .

How did you connect the HD camcorder (what make/model is it?) to your laptop for you to get the video off it and onto your hard disk? Has the hard disk been defragmented recently and is it a SATA drive running at 7,200rpm or slower?

__________________
Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick any day...

Hey Guys,

thanks for all your responses, i am going to try all the things suggested and get back to you. just to answer a few of your questions:

No, there is nothing running in the background. No virus checker installed, no scanning software etc.

The file sizes arnt huge. the largest is 4gb, and the smallest is 72mb. Even the smaller file is jerky.

I connected my camcorder via the cable it came with, and simply transferred the files off the camera like you would with a card reader. the video files were on the card, so i simply copy and pasted them from the camera to the computer.

The laptop hasnt been defragmented lately, and im really not sure about what type of drive i am running. its a Compaq Presario C700 laptop with a 160GB hard drive.

OK im going to try your suggestions, and will post back the results when i have them. thanks again for your support guys.

Was the cable a USB cable? I think maybe the video file format your camcorder is saving to the memory card might be the problem, the software you are using (giving you the jerky playback) is having a problem with the video file format, it can't play it back properly, do you know what format the video files are? Again, what make/model is your camcorder so it can be checked out on Google for more info.

__________________
Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick any day...

hey there,

sorry for the delay in getting back here. been a busy few days. Yes i transferred the video files from the camera card to my computer using the usb cable that came with the camera. the make and model of the camera is

Sanyo Xacti HD1000



ive tried all the things you guys have suggested, and still having the problem. I ripped into the computer a dvd the other day to see what the playback was like and it was perfect.

The camera is catching the footage in .MP4 format.

im only having the problem with footage which was captured on this camera, and was transferred to the computer. If you view the footage from the camera onto a tv, its a perfect picture.