I was intrested in making a highlight of our teams performence at FLRC and i wanted to know what software you use to make your highlight movies.
We use Adobe Premiere and Avid. They are professional products and priced as such. We need them because my team recorded our entire last year and we are in the process of creating a TV show about it. You can see the 5 min promo in our pits.
If you are looking for a free video editor, I suggest VirtualDub. I use it for the minor amount of video editing I do at home.
I used Apple’s Final Cut Express (I’m on a Dual G5 ;)).
I only had about 15 minutes of footage though, so it wasn’t that hard to handle 
(I’m going to try and convince people to shoot more at nats, I don’t have a camcorder)
I use Pinnacle Studio to make the videos on the team 228 website. It is easy to use, pretty powerful, and can be used to make a variety of file formats, as well as professional DVDs. Also, it costs only about $100. (Adobe Premier costs $700) It is definitely a great value for teams with a smaller budget.
The only downside is that it can’t output to .mov format 
, but it will output to .wmv (Windows Media), .rm (Real Media), .mpeg (layer 1 and 2), and .avi.
I have used Premiere, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, but my favorite is Producer. Producer is an add-on to PowerPoint and you can synchronize in all different kinds of content (audio, video, slides, etc.) It also allows you to chop up video like all other editors. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/technologies/producer.aspx So, if you have a small to medium amount of content, give MS Producer a try.
I am going to plug Windows Movie Maker and take what I’ve got coming. Granted, it is somewhat inferior to the other ones mentioned. However, it is extremely easy to use, free, and can produce some pretty good stuff. You can concentrate on the presentation (which is what counts) instead of the software. The .wmv compression format is excellent and scalable to anything from DVD quality (actually, this is saved as a DV-AVI) to a streaming web video. I tried editing on a mac with Final Cut Pro, and it froze (so much for mac reliability 
), so I did all my editing on my laptop with Windows Movie Maker with what I think are pretty good results:
http://web.mit.edu/first/www/05media/05reel_512.wmv
Edit: The pan over still photos was done with Windows PhotoStory (also free) and clipped in to Movie Maker.
Theres a free version of the avid software with less features… it needs more ram then I have atm, so I havent gotten to try it (I only have 256mb… atm)
I would use iMovie if I had any footage to edit. (do not use windows movie maker!)
edit:
If your using a mac theres this amazing program called still life to pan over still photos (may be available for windows I havent checked.) Be sure to use the second to last version if you can find it becuase the newest version puts a nasty watermark over it,
i use a program called showbiz (software thats included with my comp) i dont like using windows movie maker too much…showbiz is pretty easy to learn it only took me about an hour and a half to make the movie, considering that it was the second movie that i ever made on showbiz
but the video that i made came out pretty good, one of the judges said that it was one of the things that helped us win the imagery award
For the 4 years I did video on 177 I used iMovie. It’s relatively easy to learn and use, and I found that it could do most of what I needed for highlight videos. I would have liked to use something a little more advanced, but I never got around to learning anything else.
nero is really good but it is kinda expensive
Yeah, that’s where the new Final Cut Express comes in