Video Editing Software?

Both SteelyKid’s kindergarten and the snow-day day-care program that the kids go to were closed today, which kind of threw a wrench in things. But it’s also kind of fun, as I got to spend some time playing outside with SteelyKid on her play set in the snow. The “featured image” above is a cell-phone snap from this, and I got three short video clips of her going down the slide.

Of course, it’s kind of stupid for these to be three separate YouTube clips, but when I went to stick them together using Windows Movie Maker (which is what I’ve used for this sort of thing in the past), it turns out that it doesn’t recognize the .mp4 files that my phone produces as media files that it can import. It won’t handle the .mov files produced by my camera, either.

While this seriously increases my long-standing desire to go to Silicon Valley and just start slapping software engineers for producing the idiotic gaggle of incompatible video formats that we’re stuck with, it also raises a serious problem, namely that one of the things I was hoping to work on in the next week or two is a short video on a science-y topic, which would potentially involve combining media clips. And since the only video editor I have is Windows Movie Maker, which is a worthless piece of crap that can’t handle the output of any of my media-recording devices, I apparently need a new video editing program.

(Yes, I could try to use something like avidemux to convert between video formats until I find something my idiot software can handle. I could also stab myself in the eye with a fondue fork, which prior experience with format conversion suggests would be considerably more enjoyable.)

So, wise and worldly readers, what should I be looking at, here? The constraints are that it has to run under Windows (I’m not switching to a Mac, no matter how much of a religious experience Apple users may find it to be, ditto Linux), should be simple before powerful (that is, I’ll accept a limited feature set if it’s easy to use, provided it can handle the files I have– what I want to do is basically like the Bohr-Einstein puppet show from a few years back), and shouldn’t be exorbitantly expensive. Free would be best, obviously, but I’m willing to pay a small amount of money for something that works.