Video/stills editing software

[zins4me]

I've have been doing a little research on video editing software. Pinnacle seems to be the one that most people recommend. Is one version easier/better than the other? I would also like to create slide shows using my stills and I would like the option to make neat looking greeting cards using my pictures. Can Pinnacle do all of this or do I need something like PhotoShop as well? Is there a particular version of PhotoShop that most people like? Thanks in advance for the input! I'm so clueless on this kind of stuff.

[danagee]

I use Microsoft's Picture-it for photo editing and their free version of Movie Maker for my video editing.
I've found both really easy to use - I've never had to read any instructions and have created great home dvds and cards from both.
Good luck
Dana

[wookiewoo]

I'm by no means an expert in this area, but thought I'd offer my 2cents for what it's worth... I'm not familiar with the Pinnacle product for video editing, I have used their cd/dvd burning utiliy and was overall happy with it for the $$. We have used adobe premiere CE and have been very happy with it. It is very similar to photoshop according to my husband, it took him a bit to figure it out but he got a book at the library that was helpful. He highly reccomends it but I have no clue how much it costs (it was bundled with our computer) and I know that he had to "upgrade" to get a lot of the special effects.

As for creating slide shows, I doubt that most video editing progs would do that or the photo editing. I have seen http://picasa.google.com/ posted as a good free alternative to photoshop. Adobe also offers a very basic "starter version of photoshop album for free if you register here http://www.adobe.com/products/photos...m/starter.html
I'm sure you can find free slide show progs also, just be careful of what you download :)

I haven't used either but seen positive feedback about both posted in other forums.

Sorry so long, but I hope that helps :)

Heather

[jgriffin]

I've used Pinnacle a little bit, and it is a pretty buggy program. We have Studio Plus, v9. It has a lot of features (nice transitions, some pretty menu options), but it crashes a lot and sometimes does weird stuff. It will make a "movie" slide show with stills, but it doesn't have photo editing capabilities.

We've got Picasa installed on DH's computer and it is an incredible program (and the price is right!) You can do red-eye reduction and crop pictures. Not so sure if you can do greeting cards. We love it because it organized all of our digital photos (and we have about 36 gigs of them!)

HTH!

Jen

[wookiewoo]

I found this info on another forum

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=149864

looks like some people have some strong feelings against it, but it's free after rebate from the site that they mention. I might give it a try and some said that you can use the 9.0 version to get a rebate on the 10 version that is supposed to be better...

confusing yes but thought it might help you out :)

Heather