Okay, I'm a big fan of this girl on Youtube named Julia Nunes. Here's her doing a cover of Say Anything's "A Walk Through Hell."

I think Julia is just using the video editor that comes with her Mac to record these songs in separate parts and edit them into a song and video. It's great, it works just like a multi-track recorder. You can time everything accurate enough to lay the tracks down perfectly.

Anyway, lately I'm taking sanshin lessons (the Okinawan ancestor of the shamisen), and it's really quite easy so I'm picking it up quickly. The problem is that just a sanshin and one guy is pretty boring. But, if you have a guitarist, some of the Okinawan percussion instruments, and enough people shouting "I-ya-sa-sa" it can be a blast. So I wanted to try to record some Okinawan music in the style of Julia Nunes.

The problem is that I have a PC running Vista. Does anybody know what program I can use on Vista to do that? Free is preferable, but if that's impossible anything is okay really.

Of course, I'll post the videos here if it works out!

There's not a whole lot of good FREE video editing software out there.
The most popular is windows movie maker, although its quite limited and may not be accurate enough for what you want. Since you have vista, its probably on your pc. As of windows 7, they stopped shipping windows movie maker, and now there is only windows live movie maker, which has EVEN LESS features than the old one.

Another option if you are a masochist would be avisynth. Its free and open source, and lets you do pretty much anything. The downside (in this case), is that avisynth is a scripting language. So, this means anything that you do to your video has to be written as text commands. It works, but it would probably be too difficult and time consuming for something like this.

Linux has a number of free video editing apps all at varying levels of quality. You can even download a "live cd" with some of them, which lets you boot your computer to linux and run them without having to actually install anything.

Aside from that, commercial software would probably be your best option. Vegas movie studio is probably one of the most full-featured applications that comes at a reasonable price.

Tzadeck Wrote:enough people shouting "I-ya-sa-sa"

Recording multiple tracks doing the same thing doesn't give you a chorus effect unfortunately. I heard somewhere that you can play the original and sing along with it in to a different recorder, but I haven't tried it since I've only got the one.

P.S. Is video that important? I'd try using audacity before forking out for Vegas.

I think ACID would be good for this
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/musi...=7777-4701

and they have a free 10 track version
http://www.acidplanet.com/downloads/xpress/

Although if you want to do video I guess that's vegas, but you could do the audio and video separately.

I wish there was a mac version of ACID, it's the one program I miss!

Thanks for the suggestions so far! I'm gonna check these out a bit and see what I can accomplish. Especially, I'm wondering to what extent I can record with an audio program and then put it to video. I have a particular song I want to try to record, and I still have to learn it on both guitar and sanshin. The guitar will be easy, I have no idea about the sanshin (largely depends on if there are many notes that are farther down the neck, haha).

I've used Windows Movie Maker, and I couldn't figure out how to do things accurately, but maybe I'll give it one more look before I start messing around with other video software.

I do want it to be on video. I was planning on starting a Japan v-blog, and I though this might be an interesting way to start it.

Tzadeck Wrote:I've used Windows Movie Maker, and I couldn't figure out how to do things accurately, but maybe I'll give it one more look before I start messing around with other video software.

Yea, WMM doesn't let you make cuts at the frame level. It only has accuracy to about a tenth of a second, if I remember correctly.
That said, depending on what you are doing, maybe you could mix the audio in acid, and then use wmm to edit some video to it. I definitely wouldn't recommend using WMM for any kind of audio manipulation.

A few suggestions:

http://www.virtualdub.org/

Virtualdub (probably the most popular FREE video capture/procesing
software out there. Many anime groups use this to capture/process
video)


http://www.blender.org/

Blender (has a Video Sequence Editor)


http://www.lightworksbeta.com/

Lightworks has been used by Hollywood for over 20 years to
make films. It is now in the process of becoming open source.
NOTE: This is NOT the LightWorks company(http://www.lightwork.com/)
that makes the 3D software for film.