have over your editing. There are lots of semi-automatic stuff available for $50~60 and I think free. Adobe has various versions, but I think they are on a subscription.

Many are on a trial basis. I tried a lot of them before I decided on Vegas Pro. Vegas Movie Studio is also very powerful for $150 and contains a lot of stuff a "family" guy would want. I wanted more power (embedded tracks, etc) and so I opted for Vegas Studio, it was freakin' expensive, but their upgrade policy rocks (if you can call waiting until the end of the year for a $250 upgrade awesome).

I have no complaints and love the way it works.

Quality of output is also dependent, you need to read up on Codecs, encoding, bitrates, etc. And then decide what resolution you want.

I use to be all 1080p/1080i with dreams of 4k, but my hard drive gave a huge "NO". I now shoot and encode in 720p 30fps and love the quality per storage space. That said, I'm just fililng up my next 1TB drive and am moving up to 4TB and hard drive space is shrinking rapidly.

Also remember, for "family memories" you need backups. So that $150 4TB drive? Yeah, might as well buy 2 for a backup. But what if your house burns down? YOu might need another stored at another location. The money adds up super quick.

And if you are running anything other than an i7 with a $250 video card, be prepared to wait. Honestly, video encoding takes up MUCH MORE CPU/GPU resources and RAM than Skyrim with all of the extra texture mods and full resolution ever dreamed of using.

YES, I highly recommend buying a "gaming rig" or building one from Newegg. $1500 will get you a six core i7 with 12GB 2000+mhz RAM, GDDR5 2GB video card, 128GB SSD for bootup, and another 24" monitor. Yes, you don't want 2 monitors, you want 3.

screen #1: Open up all of your folders and files and move them into the project, can also contain your photo editing software and other instances of the video encoder program to edit short clips.
screen #2: The video encoding program with the timeline.
screen #3: A full screen real-time preview of your video that you can play and tweak with.

Yup, I'm ordering the Display Port adapter for my third monitor right now. I am SICK of the two monitor work flow, it's slowing me down. I'm still using an older i7 and I have 2 old 4:3 monitors from the early 2000s and only one 16:9, but it is better than nothing.


It is a super, super fun hobby, but expensive as heck.

Because we haven't even gotten to the video cameras yet.......


Right now I make videos "mocumentary" style of our Jeeping adventures around Utah, and in order to get 1 30-minute production right it pretty much takes 3~6 cameras and tons of footage. The end result is awesome, but I have a much better respect for filmmaker school now.

Good luck, and start hiding the $$ from your wife now, you will need it!!