Most home movies are jammed-together affairs, but anyone can make their videos better with a little schooling in the basics of story-telling. The Wikiversity has a free multi-part "Film School" that focuses on the kinds of tips just as helpful to unofficial wedding videographers as aspiring auteurs. Learn the basics of framing, editing in "L cuts," and when and where to cut a scene. Some of it does get a bit technical for DIY directors, but you'll pick up enough to have real pride in the next set of home-burned DVDs you send out.

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Animated GIF images get a bad rap as throwbacks of the web of yesteryear, but they can also be a neat way to show a quick existing video sequence without having to worry about formatting and compatibility. A Ubuntu enthusiast offers a simple guide to creating slick-looking animations using two free, cross-platform software tools, MPlayer and the GIMP. While the first installation command is for Ubuntu Linux systems only, the other steps should be easy to follow along with in Windows, Mac, or Linux. Grab a favourite DVD, pick a scene that works without sound, and share a moment with friends—or the whole world.

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Splice together YouTube clips without downloading a single one using Omnisio, a free video compilation website with all the standard share/embed/reply features of modern web apps. The editing interface is decidedly simple—move the sliders to the start and ending parts of the clip you want, then choose the next video and do the same. For presentations with online access and web projects, it's a pretty handy tool, but having the entirety of YouTube, Google Video and Blip.TV as your stock material might inspire more than a few would-be film splicers. Omnisio is free to use, and a sign-up lets you save and embed videos.

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Windows only: Got a cell-cam clip or other video that's in need of some right-side-up rotating for compute and television display? Free Video Flip and Rotate, an appropriately titled free Windows utility, will get the job done. The interface is dead-simple: Choose a file, decide which way and by how many degrees you need to rotate, and hit "Rotate." The video will likely grow a bit—about 25 percent, by some accounts—and take some time, depending on your video size, but runs fairly fast and without installing anything else on your system. Free Video Flip and Rotate is a free download for Windows systems only.

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So your friend popped the question at a concert last week, and your only evidence is a pixellated, under-lit cell phone video? Free webapp FixMyMovie won't get you up to HD-quality, but it can cure many of digital video's common ailments. Upload a video (original files are best), compare the "before" and "after" segments, then give FixMyVideo the job and preview your smoothed-over video in full screen, with the option to grab still screenshots at any point. I didn't have a video file of the tossed-off kind FixMyMovie can best help, but the MakeUseOf.com folks seem to vouch for this free service.

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The Giveaway of the Day website is featuring ZC Video Converter software today - it offers "one click format conversion" for a range of video files including AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, WMV, MOV, RM to any output format you want.
System requirements are: DVD writer drives, 256M or more memory, 5GB or more free disk space and DirectX8.0 or higher.
I haven't tried it yet but figured it can't hurt to have software available for converting video to DVD format. The giveaway is on for about 6 1/2 more hours if you're interested.

Giveaway of the Day

Linux only: Convert your video files for DVDs, iPods or easily-playable formats from inside your file browser using a simple script. Users of Linux systems running on a KDE desktop just need to download the ffmpegmenu script and place it in the appropriate file browser folder, and a new "Video Encoding" menu will appear in your sidebar. Detailed instructions and download links are at the link below. The ffmpegmenu script works in Linux only and requires a KDE environment, or at least the majority of the KDE tools installed in any desktop.