Monday 15 October 2012

How to Edit Canon 650D Video on Your Windows PC

How to Edit Canon 650D Video on Your Windows PC


I've been asked a few times about the workflow that I use for editing the video footage from the Canon 650D DSLR camera. Since I discovered the Neoscene Cineform software a couple of months ago the workflow has been very simple! All my work is carried out on my PC running Windows Vista64, the workflow on a Mac may be simpler still.

Firstly all video is copied from the Compact Flash card onto a dedicated 1Tb video storage drive (internal SATA drive). The original video from the Canon 650D (and also the Canon 7D and 500D) is stored as Quicktime MOV using H.264 codec but this is almost impossible to edit natively on a PC so needs to be converted to AVI format.

Launch Neoscene and convert all 650D video clips from MOV to AVI. For simple projects the only editing tool I use is ..... Microsoft Movie Maker!! Its very straightforward and quick for small projects but the limitations show for more complex editing tasks.

Once the video is edited I normally save using the 720p HD template for uploading to the web or the normal 1080p for keeping on the PC. If the 720p option isn't used then the aspect ratio of the video tends to be wrong which compresses the image to 4:3 rather than 16:9