Move Over Spielberg

Those of us who grew up in the '50s and '60s may be suppressing memories of old home movies. Remember how Dad filmed every picnic, school play, and graduation day, then spliced the reels with tape and made the family endure his shaky, out-of-focus productions?

Fast-forward to the present. Modern camcorders offer automatic exposure and focus, technology to steady shaky pictures, and CD-quality stereo sound. Plus, we can watch finished movies on a television--no need to lug out a big white screen or find empty wall space. But more important, PCs are finally powerful enough to let us edit our amateur footage and create professional-looking movies.

Further helping matters, the newest generation of camcorders store images in digital format on special tapes, resulting in better quality. Older, analog camcorders store video as a gradation of electrical signal strengths with an infinite number of possible values. Due to limitations in hardware and media, the signal will never be captured, transmitted, or transferred with 100 percent accuracy. Its quality will degrade further with each reproduction--just like a photocopy. In contrast, a digital camcorder encodes information as a sequence of ones and zeros, so when it's transferred, you either get it or you don't. Liken the difference between analog and digital to shades of the truth versus a yes/no answer.

To produce polished movies, you must transfer video from the tape to your PC and massage it with software. Fortunately, new capture cards and applications make importing video into your PC easier and less expensive than in years past. We tested a cross-section of products designed for everyone from beginners looking to clean up their home videos to semiprofessionals who want to produce corporate training films or even independent cinema.