MP4 Editors ??

Adobe Premier Elements 10 constantly amazes me with what it can do. It is currently about $57 on Amazon. For a $25 month of video training on lynda.com you can learn it well and quickly.

Supported video formats are:

Adobe Flash® (.swf)
AVI Movie (.avi)
AVCHD (.m2ts,.mts,.m2t)
DV Stream (.dv)
MPEG Movie (.mpeg,.vob,.mod,.ac3,.mpe,.mpg,.mpd,.m2v,.mpa,.mp2,.m2a,.mp v,.m2p,.m2t,.m1v,.mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.aac, 3gp,.avc,.264)
QuickTime Movie (.mov,.3gp,.3g2,.mp4,.m4a,.m4v)
TOD (.tod)
Windows Media (.wmv,.asf) - Windows only

Note: To import video from mobile phones (.3gp and .mp4), you must have the most recent version of QuickTime installed on your computer.

If you have windows 7 you can use the free windows live movie maker.

http://www.moviemakerpreview.com/

You will have a lot of fun with your purchase!

Those two programs have been improved so many times over the last decade that they can be complex. They can also be used in a basic and simple way. Both the simple and optional complex tools are provided. At first, I was overwhelmed because I had never used timeline editing beyond the very simple.

Adobe does provide a good online training site where people can post help sessions, including video training. That led me to lynda.com.

lynda.com has an odd business model. You subscribe by the month and have full access to all of their courseware. So, for the monthly $25 you can spend a few hours mastering PE and PS Elements (and hundreds of other software programs).

For marketing they "give away" a few lessons of each course, which is how they end up on the Adobe help sites.

Example free lessons for PE10 are:

PE10 Welcome
PE10 Workflow Overview
PE10 Creating a New Project
PE10 Playing With Time
PE10 Applying Transitions

For the other forty PE10 lessons you need to give them the $25. If you take the lessons in order, you will quickly have a very useful knowledge of what it can do and how to do it. Your editing skills and enjoyment will upscale measurably.

Bill

Their business model is that you subscribe like a magazine. They automatically bill your credit card monthly, until you stop it. Or, you buy a year's worth at a discount. It seems aimed at working people that need to enhance their skill set on a regular basis and with a variety of tools. Think of somebody that made a career change and discovers the new job requires fluency with computer tools not used on the old job.

Many (maybe all) of lynda.com courses are available on DVD. The PE10 course is priced equal to two months of subscription. So, if access to a variety of courses is important, a subscription makes sense. If you are only going to do one course and you want to spread it out over time and keep it as a reference, the DVD makes sense. The course sample files are included on the DVD and that is an extra cost option with the online subscription.

lynda.com PE10 course on DVD

There is a cheaper alternative if you are looking for a DVD approach. A German company called "video2brain" sells a PE10 course at Amazon for under $25. I bought it because I wanted to see if there were more things to learn and I was going on a motorhome trip with weak internet access.

video2brain PE10 course at Amazon

After going through both courses, I would say that lynda.com is "Excellent" because of more detail provided. Video2brain is "Very Good" with less detail. But, both share the advantage of showing you on screen how it works.

No matter which, the important part is how efficiently you can learn. I'm convinced that, for computer programs, video training is quantum leaps ahead of books, help files, forums and instruction manuals. Learning is fun when you are making efficient progress and painful when you are not.

Bill