There are lots of video editors out there, but Virtualdub meets my needs quite well. It’s fast, updated regularly, has excellent support via the forums, and has plugin capabilities. The learning curve is, well, a bit steep for a non-video-editing person like myself, but a few hours of study has enabled me to produce some short videos with some basic edits, cool fades and fun musical tracks. Not too bad for a video loser like myself.

If you want this program, you’ll need some codecs and plugins to make everything work right. For instance, I tried editing a JVC .MOD file, but all I got was an error message. Apparently I needed the mpeg-2 plugin. You can get that here. Download it and unzip it in the virtualdub plugins folder.

Great, now you have the plugin, but you have no sound. No problem. You can get sound for that stupid .MOD file by downloading an AC3 decompressor. You can get that right here. After you download the codec, you have to unzip it, then right-click the .inf file and click “install.” All done.

Other plugins provide additional functionality. The FadeFX plugin allows you to easily fade in from or to black. Nice. Easy.

Compressing videos is another matter. You’ll need some codecs if you don’t have them already. I’d recommend at least ffdshow and DivX (when you download DivX, you only need the codec, not the player or the other junk). These allow you to compress your videos for sites like YouTube or whatever you’d need to compress videos for.

I’ve just started playing with videos, and I’ve posted a few on YouTube. Check them out if you’re bored (type in mreae in the YouTube search). As you can see, compressing videos for viewing on YouTube isn’t the easiest thing in the world. I’ve tried about every codec in the book and they all suck. I think I’ve achieved the best results with ffdshow, using H.264 as my encoder, and using multipass. Does that make any sense at all? It’s starting to, to me, but still, the complexity of editing video with this program is, to say the least, quite daunting. But if you’re up for the task, get Virtualdub and get it now!

Get Virtualdub here.