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Video Editing

Overview

Cheaper, more powerful home computers have moved video editing from a "professional-only" arena into the realm of the home user. The ability to edit digital video on one's computer has become increasingly necessary as families upgrade to digital video cameras and DVD burners, allowing them to share home movies with others in pristine quality.

Mac OS X

Apple's iMovie ships with all new Macs as part of their iLife suite of digital media applications; iLife, however, is not part of the actual operating system.

No free video editing software comes with OS X.

Windows XP

XP ships with Windows Movie Maker for editing videos. Windows Movie Maker supports .avi, .wmv and .mpg for video import formats and exports videos to .wmv or DV-AVI.

Windows Movie Maker

Microsoft also supplies Windows Media Encoder as a free download from their website for encoding videos, which supports screen capture to video. Windows Media Encoder's only drawback is that it can only encode files into Windows Media Video format (.wmv).

Windows Media Encoder

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Conclusion

Disappointingly, Apple has separated iMovie from Mac OS X, opting instead to include it on all new computers. This means that anyone who purchases a Mac will get the latest version of iMovie automatically; however, users with older computers who wish to just upgrade their operating system will have to pay for the latest version of iMovie separately. Microsoft includes Windows Movie Maker as a part of Windows itself, so anyone who purchases Windows XP will also gain access to Windows Movie Maker.

Mac OS X: 1
Windows XP: 7 (8)

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