Improve home movies with these editing tips

The gap between Hollywood and home-movie making has never been narrower. Many blockbuster films and TV programmes are edited using software that is surprisingly similar to that available for home use.

In our feature about creating better home movies, we demonstrated how easy it can be to produce a simple yet impressive-looking home video with the editing software that comes with your PC: Windows Movie Maker.

But plenty more can be achieved if you know how. Here we will be showing how to edit home videos, using many techniques that were once only available to professional film-makers, and tell you where to get a free trial version of the software we are using.

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While Windows Movie Maker is a good tool for making basic cuts and trims, you will have to look elsewhere to create serious impact with home movie edits. We are not suggesting you buy an expensive package such as Final Cut Studio (£799) or Adobe Premiere Pro (£758).

Instead, there are plenty of powerful, easy-to-use editing programs available for much less, including Corel Videostudio Pro X2 (£35), Sony Vegas Movie Studio (£44), Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 Deluxe (£50) and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (£75), all of which offer trial versions.

We are going to use one of our old favourites: Pinnacle Studio. The standard edition of Studio 12 costs £40, though the Plus (£70) and Ultimate (£100) versions are worth buying if you are working with high-definition (HD) video, as these editions have built-in support for editing and outputting HD.

There is a trial version of Studio 12 Plus. Click on the ‘Download Trial’ button. You will need to register with Pinnacle to download the software, so enter an email address and click Next, then fill in all the necessary fields in the form, remembering to tick the checkmark next to ‘No’ if you want to opt out of marketing emails.

Click Next again, then on Continue and finally on where it says ‘to download the file directly click here’. Save the file to the Windows Desktop or somewhere else. The Studio 12 Plus trial is a 1.4GB download, so it will take a long time to complete, even over a fast broadband connection.

Once the download has finished, double-click on the StudioTrialExtractor.exe file and follow the on-screen instructions to install the application, then go to Start, All Programs, then Pinnacle Studio 12 to launch it.