Vegas Movie Studio

 As I stated in the intro, the goal is to see if practical and informative video can be created on the cheap. In order to do this you only need a computer and software. Believe it or not you don't need a video camera but that is part of the current plan. We have a digital camera for stills and that also comes in handy.

For a computer I work on a Dell Dimension 4500, with 1 Gb of RAM, a Pentium 4 1.8 GHz processor, 80 Gb drive, and running Windows 2000 SP4. Its about 4 years old and while its handled creating a 30 second video spot pretty easily it will be interesting to see how it does when it gets up to 5 minutes.

Two months ago I purchased the Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition, which seems to work pretty well considering how inexpensive it is. It has great interactive tutorials which has made it a lot easier to work with. I have the advantage of already working with Final Cut Pro so I already know video editing basics. The disadvantage being I know what buttons I'm looking for, they're just not in the same places anymore.

Once you have the computer and software all you need is content, and again, it doesn't have to be video. Windows allows you to record voice files and you can create your own slides using PowerPoint or even Bitmap. Plus whatever pics you want to take with a digital camera. So if you have staff that are camera shy (including yourself) you can create video that doesn't involve people. I wouldn't recommend it but its an option.

Just to play with the software when I first got it, and since I don't have a video camera yet, I created this 30 second test clip using some photos I had, the text feature in Vegas, plus a sound effects CD that came with it. Here's the clip on YouTube, and the beautiful thing is that YouTube lets you incorporate clips into your pages, which would look like this. WARNING: The clip is ugly.