[bintbeled]

Here's the scoop from my better half:

"The method I use should work for most instances.

The programs I use are two interrelated Sony products - Vegas ($525.00) and Sound Forge9 ($300.00).
These are pretty expensive, but Sony Studio products and other editors such as Pinnacle and the Windows movie maker that comes with XP and Vista will also work. For Mac users, their supplied programs or Final Cut (full or lite editions) should do it for you.

step 1. bring the video into your movie-editing program (Vegas) either as a capture or direct import. (Vegas and Sony's Vegas Movie Studio($89.99) will accept almost everything.)

step 2. edit the video to your liking. If the sound is lame, I then export it to Sound Forge 9 and punch it up. The sound is imported back to Vegas and matched (automatically, in this case) to the movie track.
Sound Forge Audio Studio ($69.95) works the same way with the less expensive Movie Studio product.

step 3. Render the video and save it to one of the You Tube accepted formats. ["YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats." (from the youtube faq page).]

I use the .wmv format which is also accepted by MyFamily [Latifa says: this is the website that hosts my special student page] and players such as Real. This results in a high quality video that shows your dances off rather than has people wondering about fuzzy/distorted images.

There is some anguish involved in doing this the first time but once you are comfortable it is fairly easy.

If you want to go a bit farther, you can add special effects and even export the sound track to a music editing/composition program such as Acid.

These price for these programs will vary and I'd suggest checking PCWorld.com or CNET for the current best prices.

One other note: I have used Pinnacle Studio versions 8-10, but when I switched to a dual core Pentium D machine, Pinnacle went haywire and their techs were zero help - seemed to not understand much beyond "please check to see if your computer is plugged in, sir". I spent a good deal of time and money trying to get Version 10 to work on either a PentiumD or AMD Athlon64 machine - most often, it crashed as it was coming up. My older Pinnacle 9 wouldnt work on the Dmachine and needed lots of patching and TLC to work at all on the AMD (still crashed more often then not). I have used my Sony products on either machine (both Vegas and Vegas studio) with no problems.

send me an email if you have questions or suggestions: dwilkinson93 (at)comcast.net

Mr. Latifa aka KayakCommando Dave"

OK, back to the much-less-technical Latifa. If all of the above is gobbledy-gook, and you would rather just have Mr. Latifa manipulate the video and either return it to you or upload it to youtube, just drop him a line. He provides tech support to dancers and his rates are very reasonable.