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Buy Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 get FREE Corel MediaOne Plus, Special Effects Filters by Nik Software & 2 hours of video training.


I have been helping my mother in law with photo editing and something I knew for a long time became very clear. Adobe Photoshop is difficult. Now before you all proclaim that I must not be adept at software remember, I am a video editor. For the last 10 years I have absorbed without formal training, all the video editing software I needed to for my TV jobs - Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere (several versions), Media 100, Sony Vegas...get it? I can sit down and learn a fairly complicated piece of software within days of needing to use it. Photoshop hates me. I have taken classes, seminars and the most embarassing...lessons from my high school students. I can do easy things with Photoshop but can't seem to retain the great features. So back to my mother in law. She is a great photographer and took a Photoshop class as well. She was so frustrated, just like me. So I told her that long ago I had switched to Corel Paint Shop Pro and I no longer swore or cried over my photo editing. :) So she bought it and feels the same way. Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has seen several upgrades over the past several years and is now just about perfect consumer software. It is so easy to use that I was able to give my mother in law several lessons on the phone.
Now for professionals who are saying that Photoshop can do more, they are correct, I will concede that point. Once in a great while I will find that I need to do something that Corel can't do. But that is about 1 in 300 photo editing jobs. I love Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and I highly recommend it.

For the past 2 years, I have turned countless students and adults on to the wonderful, free tool inside almost everyone's Windows based computer. Windows Movie Maker is a marvel and the majority of those I teach had no idea it was living on their hard drive. The next astonishing fact is that it's easy for almost everyone to use. I have had adults in my classes who were uncomfortable surfing the internet and googling and even they caught on quickly to WMM's ease of use. The teacher in me loves the instructions right there on the left side, called tools as they should be and completely clear...do this, do this, do this ....wah-lah you have a movie. As a broadcast professional and video editor for 30 years and someone comfortable with most video editing software, this is the best way to learn to edit video. Find some pictures and import them into collections, locate the free music in the music sample folder and begin to edit your first masterpiece. It's delightful to have students of all ages make a 30 second movie with pictures and sound and want to take it home to show everyone that they edited their very first video! That's the beauty and simplicity of Windows Movie Maker and it's exactly as it should be for a free, first experience video editing program.
I have read all of the very technical reviews on each and every version, but there is no need to take apart every little flaw in this software. I'll talk about the few drawbacks a little later but for now let's just rave about its positives. This software does what it's supposed to, edit a simple video and output it to a CD or videotape. I think too often the reviewers are expecting too much from this free gift or expecting with later versions that it should do more and more. It shouldn't. With more bells and whistles come more complicated instructions and functions, again defeating the purpose of this easy to use software.
Here's what I like. It's free. Second and actually more important is that it has many wonderful effects that are actually quite complicated even for professional editors in expensive video editing software. My students often need the wonderful old film look or the "ease in" feature so we edit our larger pieces in Adobe Premiere Pro and then import the finished piece to WMM to easily add those great effects. Premiere will do most of them and certainly Adobe After Effects will, but WMM does them effortlessly! I am especially impressed with the titles and title overlay track. To make a newspaper headline with your video inside and then fly it away to reveal new video is very complicated in professional editing software. The WMM squeeze left or right for rolling credits at the end is also brilliantly simple. One special trick I've learned while teaching WMM is being able to separate your video and audio and using just the audio on the music or audio track. It's a much more versatile timeline than it first appears.
Downsides are few but I promised so here goes and there are really only two complaints. Number one is that the output instructions are too vague and complicated. When you output you need to know why you are outputting and what the quality will be and it isn't explained very well. In the "other" section of "save this video to my computer" there are way too many choices for the inexperienced video user. It should be clearly marked that the best quality saving option is the DV/AVI. But the instructions should also warn that that file will take up a lot of hard drive space. This is a confusing issue for even professionals and it's a new problem for video on the web, but the software authors should find a way to explain it more clearly. What ends up happening is the editor unknowingly picks a bad quality file. After working so hard on the video they get a bad outcome: a fuzzy video. That makes them blame the Windows Movie Maker software or their computer and they stop trying to edit video. Number two - none of us like the fact that you can't move video around on the timeline (you can move audio around separately and have it stay where you put it). But when I teach it, I explain that it's meant to be rigid so the newb editor can't make a mistake, no matter how hard he or she tries. When you find yourself irritated about that rigidity you have learned all you can learn on WMM and it's time to upgrade to one of the wonderful and inexpensive new softwares out on the market - Adobe Elements, Pinnacle or Sony Vegas. For more on those and the rest of the creative video and audio tools go to my website at www.edithomevideo.com or send me an email at info@edithomevideo.com. In the meantime, start practicing and make some home movies!

You have boxes, draws and shelves full of video tape, old film and now DVDs and CDs ... family memories, favorite TV shows and images you just don't want to throw away but now what do you do with them? Wouldn't it be great if you could upload a clip for your blog or website? All that old footage won't last forever.  Video tape that's 20 years old should be a concern, as the tape gets brittle and the mechanics of the tape housing itself may fail. It's time to get them transferred and then, most importantly, edited into something that won't put your relatives to sleep!

But where do you start?  Ten years ago this discussion wouldn't have been possible. A professional video editing system for just one type of format...VHS, DVC Pro, Beta or 3/4 inch would have been at a minimum $15,000 and more likely $100,000.  Today, my editing system is Adobe's Premier Pro, in the third bedroom of my house on a PC with alot of Ram and hard drive space but low on cost. Most media computers, or PCs with enough space can accomodate current editing systems like Adobe Premier Elements which is a popular, simple editing system for the novice or the professional. But the system isn't the important part, it's the process of editing.  And that's what this lens is all about, tips, tricks and an easy to understand explanation of how to turn those hours of vacation footage into a snappy music video that will impress your friends and family!

In this technological age of disposable video toys you probably have more than one VCR in your home. Take a 3 prong AV cable (yellow, red, white plugs) and connect the two together. Put a blank tape into the right machine and your last VHS vacation in the left. Find a favorite visual moment and put that left machine in pause. If you put your right machine into record and then release pause on your left machine, congratulations...you just made an edit! All editing is based on that concept. Transfering, moving, copying or placing video or still footage from one source to another. Now that computer editing is available to the consumer, it's a system called non linear, meaning you can move footage around on a sequence or timeline, and you aren't limited by video tape. As you can see in your two machines side by side, you have some limitations. If you decided you didn't like that video you edited first on your right machine, you would have to start over and replace that shot with another one (with professional tape editing systems there is something called insert and assemble editing which allows you to replace shots without ruining your video, but that's a discussion for another lesson). Nonlinear computer editing has given editors limitless freedom to create and change a video without the confines of tape. But regardless of technology, editing rules and creative concepts that make a visually pleasing video are basic and apply to those two machines hooked together in front of you.