Free HD editor

[laserblazer]

I'm looking for something that can do rough AVCHD editing on an Atom based netbook. Not a big ask I know. I've got my wife a netbook and would like to use it whilst on holiday.

[SYNACK]

HD editing on an Atom processor, you may need the whole holiday to do it. Not sure about the software but given the CPU constraints it may not be practical.

 

Blender supports video editing, not sure if it supports that format and its UI is legendarily difficult. Expression Encoder 4 standard is free and may give you some basic editing features like clipping and joining multiple files.

[Arthur]

A 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor is roughly equivalent in speed to a 6-7 year old Pentium M (see below for benchmarks). As Synack mentioned above, your netbook is really going to struggle when it comes to editing 720p/1080p HD video. Personally I wouldn't even bother because it's going to be an extremely frustrating experience.

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N270+%40+1.60GHz

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2537/8

 

Depending on how much disk space you have, you could convert your videos to another codec that is less taxing on the CPU. DV would be good but takes up around 13GB per hour of footage (assuming a resolution of 720x576).

[computer_expert]

a 7-8yr old 1.4ghz amd athlon struggled to play back a 1080p video for me a few weeks ago so i'd dread to think how long it would take to process a HD video on your netbook.

[laserblazer]

I appreciate I'm up against it but all I want to do is clip out the unwanted stuff, no effect rendering. If it takes all night to export afterwards, that's no big deal.

[mac_shinobi]

Couldn't you get a a 1.5 or 2tb ext hdd and store all of it onto an external hdd and edit it when you are back from holiday ??

[SYNACK]

If my above suggestion of Blender or Expression encoder don't work there may be another solution. Not sure if there is any usable software behind the signup but this is supposed to be an opensource HD video editor EditShare - The Smart Way to Edit Together - Download their press releases say they are looking to release a general download in Q3 of 2010.

 

Thing about the time taken is that even on high powered hardware renders can take overnight so unless you find an efficient one that handles slicing well it may be more of a matter of days than hours to complete the jobs if it tries a re-encode to splice and slice cleanly. Just need to give it a test run before you go I guess to see if it is viable, A raw download does sound like a good idea though. You can get 1Tb 2.5" drives now too which may be better on a trip.