Are you looking for a good video editing program?
Windows 7 has a free and simple video editor named “Windows Live Movie Maker” that you can download from the Microsoft web site.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/looking-for-windows-movie-maker
Windows Live Movie Maker is a good video editor for simple edits and creating WMV files. It also supports AVCHD files that come from HD camcorders.
If you’re looking for something with more features, we recommend Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum.
Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope
Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum costs about $100.00 through GovConnection:
Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum from GovConnection
http://www.govconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Detail.htm?sku=11548266&cac=Result
Vegas Movie Studio HD gives you much more granular control of the video editing process and has a great visual timeline for creating clips, arranging them in the order you want, and creating fades and transitions. If you’re interested in a demo, contact Bob Evans (bob@purdue.edu).
Camcorder…
Also, if you’re looking for a good camcorder, the Education IT team has been using a Sony HDR-CX110 Handycam flash-based camcorder with a 16 GB flash card. This has been a good camera for recording meetings and events. It can record both HD video and lower resolution video. The video files generated by this camera, though large, work well natively within Windows 7 and are editable within Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum.
Sony HDR-CX110 Handycam
Records to SD card and supports 1080i high definition.
We use Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum to render the video files to smaller wide-format H.264 MP4 files that can be placed on a web server or SharePoint site and downloaded by those who need access to the video. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
One thing to keep in mind when recording in HD mode is that the files will be very large and you will need ample storage space AND you will need to significantly compress video that will be placed on a streaming server so devices with low bandwidth network connections can download it. For most recording needs, lower resolution and lower bit rates work well. As long as the audio is good, most people will be able to get a sense for what is happening in the picture.