Editing sports game film in Video Studio 9

dustinsullivan33 · Post by **dustinsullivan33** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:39 pm

I am a basketball coach and was wondering if video studio 9 is simple enough to make edits and cut-ups of game footage for players to view. Sports specific stuff is too expensive for a high school teacher, but I need to find something now that all my game film is on dvd and an external hard drive. I've played around some, but had no success. What I'm wanting to do is be able to pop my dvd in (or pull up the game from my external hard drive), watch the game on my laptop and as I see clips that I want to tag make files for later viewing or dubbing to other dvd's. For example, by the time I've finished grading my film I might have clips to save to a player's highlight file, clips to save to opponents file, and clips to save to a file concerning our own play. I would want to save all these files in my external for later convenient pull up. Is all this possible with video studio 9? If this is possible do I have to capture the whole video into the system before beginning or what? I'm having trouble even beginning the process.

Thanks in advance.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 11:22 pm

Yes, you can do all that. You don't have to capture the entire game first. I do a lot of sports highlights. My workflow is to capture only the clips I need, but since you want 3 different uses out of it, capturing the whole thing might be the way to go. You'll have to decide the workflow for yourself.

Here's what I do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1rj2riYM-k

dustinsullivan33 · Post by **dustinsullivan33** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 12:49 am

so i can't just drag all clips to the bottom & then save various ones to different files on my external hard drive? would you consider this program better for these uses than movie maker?

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 1:16 am

Sure you can. You can drag them to the timeline and save them as Highlights1.vsp, Game1.vsp., etc. I was just saying there are various ways you can do it, but you'll have to figure out what works best for you, considering you are creating more than one project out of the same source.

To tell you the truth I've never really used Movie Maker. But I'm sure VS is more robust than MM, and probably just about as easy to use.

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 1:23 am

If you are wanting to use the clips as a coaching tool then VS is flexibile enough, though it's not really designed for your intent. Though, there is no reason why it can;t be used for your purposes.

Considering some of the clips you want to keep may come under several catagories it's going to be more how you catalogue your clips that's the important thing...and VS isn;t designed for cataloguing clips under different headings for cross referrensing later on.

It sounds like you'll mostly be using VS in this case as a multi trim tool.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 4:59 am

VS may not be designed for cataloging clips, per se, but it would be easy enough to do what the OP wants.

Say you want to make 3 different projects. One for player highlights, one for opponent, and one for your team. In this case I would create a library for each one with the Library Manager. Now when you capture the clips, thumbnails are placed in a library. Those thumbnails represent "virtual" clips, so when you drag one to the timeline and edit it your are not changing the original clip at all.

Let's assume that you have captured your clips to Your Teams Library. Obviously some can also be used for the player highlight project. In that case simply copy those clips and paste them to the Player Highlight Library. Same with the Opponents project.

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:13 am

Yep...I agree Black Lab.

It would be pretty straight forward doing it like that...

If you also have the correct version of MS Office, the one with the Access Database in it you can probably creat a simple databse to catalogue and add WMV type clips to each record. You can find them easier later.

It's a lot of work

but would make an invaluable coaching tool

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:25 am

Nobody said it was easy!

Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:48 am

Clevo wrote:Yep...I agree Black Lab.

It would be pretty straight forward doing it like that...

If you also have the correct version of MS Office, the one with the Access Database in it you can probably creat a simple databse to catalogue and add WMV type clips to each record. You can find them easier later.

It's a lot of work but would make an invaluable coaching tool

For those that can't afford or simply don't want to pay the high prices for MS Office/Access, theirs a freebie that does the same. In fact it can open MS Access files....

Open Office.org

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 6:59 am

Yes! Open Office