Nero Vision can seem daunting with all its options for video editing and authoring, but Nero's worked hard to make the program as easy to use as possible for the average dude.   If you're interested in using Nero for video editing, but haven't been able to get beyond the basics of StartSmart yet, I'm going to give you a quick walkthrough of some of the functionality here, so that you can get started.   There's a lot more in-depth stuff you'll be able to do down the road, but in this blog I just want to give you a kick start.   This first section will start with capturing video from your camera.

Getting Started

So, the first thing to do is start up Nero Vision (I'll be working with Nero Vision 5 for this blog, but any recent version will be pretty compatible with what I'm talking about here).   From here, you're either going to want to capture video off of one of your devices (that is, you'll want to transfer video you've recorded on a camera and pull it over to your local computer), or you'll want to open a video that you've already got on your hard drive.   For now, let's assume you're going to capture a video.  

Capturing Video

First things first: make sure you've got your camera connected to your PC (usually via USB), and that it's being recognized by Windows.   If it's not, you'll need to deal with driver installation and Windows troubleshooting, which are unfortunately outside the scope of this blog.   But, assuming everything's hunky dory, you'll want to click the "Capture Video to Hard Drive " option from Nero Vision's opening screen.  

From here, you've got two options.   You can either record live video from your device directly to your hard disk (this is useful if you're using a webcam, for example), or you can simply capture video that you've already recorded.   If you want to do the former, simply check to make sure the device is transmitting data to your PC (which you can check by looking at the video window and seeing if you're getting a live feed) and then click the record button on the console.   FYI, the record button looks like a red circle with another white circle inside it.   Once you're done recording, hit the stop button and you're ready to edit the video you've just captured.   Don't forget that you can configure the quality and format of the video you'll be capturing by using the pull-down menus on the right side of your Nero Vision window -- we'll cover exactly what these options do in the next blog on this subject.

If you'd like to capture video you've already recorded, the process is very similar. Simply tell Nero Vision which device you'd like to capture from (you can select this from the pull-down menu above the video window labeled "Capture Device ").   Then, configure the quality and format settings using the pulldowns and the "Configure " button, respectively.   Once you're satisfied that you're getting the right video, just hit the record button, and you're all set.   Vision will grab the video from your camera and put it on your hard drive.

One nifty thing to take note of: look for the little "stopwatch " button on the right of the recording console underneath the video window.   This button allows you to capture or record video for a designated period of time.   Just click it and tell Vision how long you'd like to record before it automatically stops, or for what periods of time you'd like to capture video from your device.

One you've gotten your video onto your hard disk, Vision will automatically give it a name (you can change the default filename by clicking on it once and typing the new name in the field), and will give you a prompt to move on to editing the video by clicking "Next. "  If you'd rather capture something else, or recapture the video in another format, just click the "Capture Another Video " option on the lefthand navigation.   Otherwise, click next and move into the editing area of Nero Vision, which is where we'll pick up this blog series next time!   Stay tuned.

See you next time!

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