MPEG4 camcorder but windows movie maker doesn't recognise MP4 format!

getbuzylivin

I have a Sony MP4 camcorder, I am able to drop and drag the files from the camcorder to my pc but I only have windows movie maker which doesn't recognise MP4 format. Can anyone suggest a free/cheap video editing software download/package which DOES recognise MP4 format so I can edit my video clips, perhaps add soundtrack for example - and then burn onto DVD? Thanks

vyseyboy

Directly editing MP4 is a bad idea. The normal procedure would be to re-encode the video to raw uncompressed avi (big files, but perfectly editable,) then use whatever editing suite, then re-encode at the end to whatever format (Mp4 for portability, mpeg2 for DVD's etc.)

VirtualDub is commonly used for re-encoding to-from compressed formats, but it's not the simplest bit of software ever. I can't find one straight away, but there's probably a howto for this sort of thing floating about.

Donnie

virtualdub