Is there is a good, cheap VHS video editing program for Windows 98SE. I stress cheap because I am a pensioner and price is important.

Barry Cheswick, ,

It all comes down to what you want to do. If you want to be able to bring your VHS video onto the PC then edit it and finally record it back to tape of CD, then it's a much bigger question than you probably realise. You need a fast PC, a high quality video capture card, a humongous hard disk and THEN you need the software. We're talking many thousands of dollars to get this sort of setup.

If you want to be able to edit between two VHS video recorders and only use the PC as a controller, then that is possible. There are combinations of editing software and remote controllers that will do the job, but it's quite simplistic stop/start (assemble) editing. What you do is go through the "from" tape and mark the start and stop points. When you're finished, the PC winds the "from" VCR to the first point, then starts the tape and at the same time starts the "to" tape recording. By juggling the pause and the FF and FR on the two machines, it makes a simple edited tape. Of course you get no effects, the accuracy isn't great and the job only looks so-so. In addition, since you're going from analogue to analogue, the quality drops.

The third way is to use a low-cost video input device, such as is found on TV tuner cards, and use a basic video editing package on your own PC. You'll probably be limited to around 320x240 pixels (which is a fraction of the quality of the original picture) but at least you don't lose any more quality as you do your magic. You can then save the output to CD or back to tape. (There's a very basic editor in Win Me).

The fourth alternative costs money too, but gives the best result. Tape the original video on a digital camcorder then use Firewire to import the video for editing. That's what we'll all be doing in the future when it's a s cheap as chips.

Please get back to us to clarify your needs and we'll discuss it more.

Paul Zucker