Home Video Hell

I've been a long time PC user but my recent journey into home-video-land has left me feeling pretty bitter toward Windows.

This Christmas, my wife and I decided to take our nearly 10 hours worth of home video, and edit it down into a shorter, more palatable video we could put on DVDs and share with the family. I figured this seemed like a worthy endeavor for a guy who considers himself semi-tech savvy.

After spending 6 hours on it, the project began to seem less like a worthy endeavor and more like a time sucking black hole of format incompatibility and software shortcomings.

When we got our Sony DCR-SR 40 video camera last year, it only made sense to me that if you can record directly to a hard drive (like the Sony DCR-SR 40 does) then surely you can transfer your movies to your computer, edit them, burn them to a DVD, and do it all quickly and easily. While I was right about the transferring, editing, and burning part, I was spectacularly wrong about the quickly and easily part.

The problem is this. My Sony handycam records one format of video, the Windows video editing software I have (which comes with Windows, and is otherwise more than capable of producing a fine home video) only accepts another, and then to get that video on to a playable DVD it has to be "authored" into yet a third format, which the Windows video editor does not do.

Am I missing something? Why does it not make sense for Windows to make a consumer grade video editor that can accept the video coming from my consumer grade video camera, and then output it to a consumer grade DVD? Yes, I know that there are video editing programs out there, like Sony Vegas, that do all of this in one package. But I don't need to drive a Cadillac just to go to the store to pick up milk, which is what that seems like to me.

I was eventually able to get my video edited and burned to a DVD, but there was much cursing, format conversion (and confusion), and downloading of third party applications along the way.

I don't feel like I’m asking for the world here. I'm just saying, Hey Windows, why not make life easier for us amateur home video enthusiasts by giving us a video editor that gets along with video cameras and DVDs alike. You may end up keeping some of us around if you do. If you don't, those other guys with the cooler looking products, the brilliant TV commercials, and the built in applications that do everything easily, are going to look very enticing.

By the way, should you find yourself in my predicament, let me recommend an excellent open source (AKA Free!) application called DVD Flick to help you burn your videos to DVD.