HI
Im new to vidio editing and have been messing around with pinnicle 9 and need help can you capture video from your hard drive or disc as I only seem to have the option to capture from video cam, and also can you only use mp3 files if you want to make your own sound track.

I don't use Pinnacle 9 so this will just be general help, the usual setup for capturing is you connect your camcorder to the computer either using Firewire or USB and get the software to capture the video onto the hard drive. If you have a Mini DVD or hard disk camcorder then you can either finalise the mini dvd disc in the camcorder, take it out and put it into the dvd burner drive on your computer and copy the video files onto the computer hard disk. Or if you have a hard disk camcorder then just connect it to the computer using a USB cable.

Once the video is on the computer hard drive, you can then open it up in your editor and work away on it. You can use lots of different files to make your finished video including different video file formats (.avi, .mov, .vob etc), still images (.jpeg, .tiff, .bmp etc) and audio files (.mp3, .wav, .aiff etc). What type of camcorder do you have?

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

to be honest all I have at the moment is unedited footage that I shot on an old analoge sony handycam, I had it on video tape and transfered it to dvd disc I would like to edit and add transitions but I cant get the pinnicle software to capture it from disc and when I save it from disc into a folder on my hard drive the program dosent seem to have an option to capture from hard drive the capture menu only has capture from DV as an option.

If you have video already on your hard disk then you don't use the capture setting, just import the video files into Pinnacle, now I'm not 100% certain if Pinnacle can open video files from a DVD. If it can then that's great but if it can't open them you may have to get some conversion software (do a search on Google for .vob to .wmv or .avi - so Pinnacle can handle these files much better) or download a 30 day trial of the most recent version of Sony Vegas (read more about it on the Sony Vegas section of the forum for more info and maybe post some questions there aswell) as I know this will allow you to open and work with DVD video files.

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

hi
thanks for your help I managed to convert the files to avi using a downloaded program and as you said I imported it to pinnicle which displayed a message saying it was not a standard frame rate whatever that means , I put some clips into the story board and added some transitions and played it back it slowed right down and dident play the transitions, I dont know if this is the program or maybe my computer is too slow I really want to get into video editing and might invest in a new computer what would you recommend I`v heard apple mac is best for video editing.

The software you used to convert must have changed the framerate, see if it has a setting that allows you to either select the correct frame rate for your tv system (PAL - 25fps or NTSC - 30fps) or allows you to enter the correct number. What spec is your computer, how much memory does it have, what type/speed of processor(s) does it have, how much free space is on the hard disk, is it a laptop or desktop model?

Answer these questions first before you go out spending money on a new computer that you may not need. Video files on DVD disc are more prone to problems that other kinds of video files, a lot of the popular editors and supposed 'convertors' don't work well with them, try downloading a 30 day trial of the latest version of Sony Vegas to see if that helps.

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

hi
Thanks for all your help but I think I`ll give up on this before it drives me crazy, having converted one hour of vob files to avi which I can view on windows media player, pinnicle will only import three min`s of footage,I still have analoge tapes of family holidays which I thought in my ignorance that I could edit into a digital masterpiece but I think it was easier years ago when I had my video player riged up to my handy cam and hi fi. my computer has amd athlon 1.04 ghz 512 mb ram 20 gig hard drive, I also have a lap top intel pentium 4 cpu 3.00 ghz, 3.00 gh 192mb ram

was going to give up but got sony vagas and havent looked back captured video edited added titles transitions and music even brightend up some dull clips with video effects
lots more to learn but it `s great to get started.
cheers mate