The answer depends partly on whether you’re on a PC or Mac, whether you want to spend money or not, and whether you want to do your editing online or offline. Here are the top three solutions I recommend for creating video along with a few extra resources I’ve collected while doing research on video production

Video Editing Software

Camtasia offers video creation and editing capabilities on both the PC and Mac. You can use the software for screen capture videos and editing video from other sources. You can include lots of transitions,effects, and titles, and you can export in multiple formats. Camtasia isn’t cheap, but it does do a solid job of producing the video you need for your website video.

Online Video Editing

Animoto lets you upload images, video clips, music, and mp3 audio clips to create custom video compilations that can be downloaded for use in other video projects or embedded on other websites. Since all the cinematic magic is automatically handled for you by Animoto, you don’t get access to a video editing software studio where you can trim clips and add in custom effects. But, you do have the ability to add in text titles, highlight specific pictures or video clips, and you can remix the clip until you get just the right mix of effects There is a free version and a paid version of the service and their pricing is very reasonable for the value they offer.

Pixorial offers more of a video editing experience with their Pixorial Producer product. The service is free if you are only sharing your videos with friends on Facebook, or you can pay $1.99 to download a DVD quality version of your video. They also offer other video services like VHS video importing, and bulk DVD creation. You can import video, and add transitions and titles, but there’s no option for importing audio, or still images.

JayCut is a free online, community based, video editing and sharing service. You can import your video, audio, photos for mixing your own movies. They offer titles, and transitions, and you can organize your media online into folders. Their video editor is simple to use, but the transitions are a little confusing. It’s just a matter of time spent before you get the hang of the tool. When you first upload videos and photos, it takes a while for them to show up correctly. I’m not sure why that is, but just be aware that you might want to upload your media, and then give everything 20 – 30 minutes to do any processing on their end before your clips are available as you expect. JayCut is similar to Jump Cut which was purchased by Yahoo and then shut down. I prefer offline editing tools, but if you’re looking to tap into a community of video editing, then JayCut is something to look at.

Movie Masher offers free open source video editing tools that can be installed on your website so you can let you users mix video, audio, images and text. You can control everything about the editing interface and underlying functionality, and build your own controls, effects, transitions and titles in Adobe Flash™. The whole thing is free and if you’re technical muscles are strong, it would be a great thing to integrate into your website.

Free Screen Capture Software

CamStudio is a free Windows only, screen capture tool. It works very much like Camtasia, exports to SWF Flash movie format, allows for captioning,  and is a great tool for recording your screen.

Jing Project offers a free PC or Mac option for recording screen capture videos and the tool can export to a paid screen cast hosting solution, upload to YouTube, or export to your local hard drive as an SWF Flash movie format. Overall this is another great tool for recording video, but it doesn’t provide the video editing features we’re looking for, like video, photo, and audio importing.

More on video later,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com