Create better home movies

Making home movies used to require expensive, specialised equipment and vast amounts of technical knowledge.

But now you don’t even need a camcorder. Just about every digital camera can shoot video clips, as can many mobile phones.

Of course, shooting video is only half the job. To make something good you will need to cut, paste, tweak and generally improve your footage before saving it to a DVD or uploading it to the web, and this can be an intimidating task.

Fortunately transferring and editing videos has never been easier, and there is plenty of great free software to help.

Recording footage
You don’t need the very latest video equipment to make movies. Many people will have an old analogue camcorder stashed away in a cupboard, and the good news is these are still very usable: once shot, footage can be transferred to a PC and then edited just as easily as films shot on the latest equipment.

If you purchased a camcorder at any point in the last decade or so, the chances are that it's a digital one that uses MiniDV tapes. There are a still a handful of MiniDV models available in the shops too, such as the Sony DCR-HC62E.

These connect to your computer digitally, using either a Firewire or USB cable, so getting your shots on to the hard disk and ready to edit is easy.

Other camcorders have moved away from tape entirely. Some, like the JVC Everio GZ-MG630 record to an internal hard disk. Transferring video from this kind of camcorder is really easy. Just connect it with a USB cable.

Others such as the Sony DCR-DVD150E record to blank DVD discs, which is useful if you just want to play your recordings back on a living-room DVD player, but surprisingly awkward when it comes to transferring footage to a PC for editing.

By far the best new camcorder recording format is memory card. The cards themselves are light, cheap and swappable, and transferring files on to a PC is as simple. If you are buying, look for models that use high-capacity SDHC cards such as the Panasonic SDR-S15.

HD or not HD?
High-definition (HD) camcorders such as the Canon Legria HF200 produce far higher video quality than their standard cousins, but unless you have an HD television you won’t see any benefit.

Capturing and editing HD video also requires a far more powerful computer, so unless you have a recent PC with a dual-core processor, it’s best to steer clear.

There may be no need for a camcorder at all, as many digital still cameras and mobile phones can record video clips. The one thing to check is what resolution and frame rate your device uses: anything with a resolution of at least 640x480 pixels at 25 frames per second should produce usable video.

The camera’s manual should explain what resolution and frame rate it uses. Some cameras record only video with no sound – you can add a soundtrack when editing, but this can be a pain.

Since most cameras (and camera phones) store pictures and video clips on memory cards, it’s easy to transfer them to a PC for editing. Connect the camera using a USB cable, or plug the memory card into a card reader connected to the PC, and the files can be dragged and dropped into a folder on the computer’s hard disk.