After some research into editing software, I narrowed my choices to three: Sony Vega, Corel Video Studio, and Adobe Premier Pro. All three companies offered free download of a trial version that would function for a month then shut down unless you paid up. So I began with Vega. I downloaded the trial version of Vega and imported my cemetery clips. To my bewilderment, Vega couldn’t open them properly. There was sound, but no picture. Back online I went, trying to figure out why. Thus was I introduced to codecs.
“No,” TechTerms.com reassured me, “this is not just a cheap rip-off of Kodak. The name “codec” is short for “coder-decoder,” which is pretty much what a codec does. Most audio and video formats use some sort of compression so that they don’t take up a ridiculous amount of disk space. Audio and video files are compressed with a certain codec when they are saved and then decompressed by the codec when they are played back.”
So I recoded the clips in a format Vega recognized, using the Windows 7 media encoder. But I had to process them one at a time – a tedious job. Someday, I vowed, I would own a camera that would render all that unnecessary.
After trying Sony Vega and Corel Video Studio, I made a lucky discovery. Adobe offers special pricing to faculty at universities. As an instructor at Eastern Illinois University, I could buy Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium at a fraction of the retail cost. The bundle includes not only Premier Pro and Soundbooth – the two programs I really needed – but Flash Professional, Illustrator, Photoshop, and several others. A deal too good to resist! I did the free tryout first to make sure I could work with Premier Pro. Then I went for it. Adobe offered some free online training, which helped a lot, but I’ve only begun to learn how to use these powerful programs.
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