[wrxwheelman]

I am looking to maybe get into advertising as a career and would like to start tinkering around with video to build up my portfolio. I need some general advice from you all. The basic thing I will be doing is making short commercials/videos i have thought of and can record, direct, star in, by myself or i may have a few actors.

first, at this point i'm considering buying the Canon sx110 as my point and shoot camera when i dont want to lug around my SLR + accessories. Do you think that would be okay for a starting videographer to get tinkering with editing and making short videos?

second, video editing software.... where should i start? anything cheap/free that does a good job for doing the basics? adding music, editing clips together, etc?

third, is there anything else i should take into consideration when starting out??

thank you in advance!

Shouldn't you be posting that question on a Video Camera forum? They'll be more knowledgeable than most of us.

The 'PowerShot SX110 IS' is a competent camera, the lens could b better and now that CHDK is out for it all the better.


Editing Software, 'kino' is open source and free. It's easy to use and quite powerful.


CHDK, Canon hackers developers kit.
CHDK Wiki

[reeftool]

If you are serious about video I would think a camcorder would be a much better starting point than a point and shoot with the ability for short video clips. They are pretty well priced right now and some decent ones are on Ebay as buy it now for under $150. The Windows Movie Maker that is built in to XP works ok as a starter editor. Kino if you use Linux. Adobe Premiere Elements is a good editor at a reasonable price but requires a lot of CPU resources. Download the free 30 day trial before buying to check if your machine can handle it. For serious video editing a fast, high end computer with lots of memory and large hard drives are a must. A couple of hours of of home movies filled my 80 gig hard drive in a month and I replaced it with a 320 gig. I'm not a video guy, just doing famly video of my kids and grandkids. I'll second Gary's advice about checking for video forums.