(MONEY Magazine) – The home video that made grown-ups weep on two continents began as a way for me to stay sane. Todd, my college roommate from long ago, was in town for three days of business but had his nights free. Bring pictures of your baby, I told him.

Todd has had a great couple of years. He married Betti, his gorgeous Italian girlfriend, and they had a daughter, Bianca, the spitting image of Raphael's cherubs. "Isn't she beautiful," Todd said, beaming through the first minutes of the four hours of tape he had brought. "Sometimes after Betti and I put Bianca to bed, we move to the living room and watch videos of her all night."

Three nights of baby videos could be a lot of fun. For Todd. I was hoping for more adult interaction.

The media-savvy computer in my den presented a solution. Howzabout, I suggested, we take all that footage and turn it into a finished movie, with edits, transitions, music and titles, and even subtitles for the Italian relatives? He could send it to them for Christmas. "God, they would love that!" Todd said with the thrill of a man always in search of good paths across the cultural divide. "What kind of music?"

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

--A COMPUTER WITH WINDOWS XP OR APPLE OS X OPERATING SYSTEM Making a polished video on a late-model home computer is a joy. Many come ready to make movies as soon as you pull them from the box. Windows XP now ships with Microsoft Movie Maker 2 and Apple computers come with iMovie 3. Both programs are amazingly powerful, offering lots of opportunities for creative expansion as you move up the learning curve. Don't have the latest ones? Free downloads are available at microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker or apple.com/ilife.

--A FIREWIRE PORT Apple computers are born with a FireWire port, the connector necessary to get digital footage into the machine. Only a minority of Windows-based machines are so blessed. Adding FireWire on your own requires opening the computer's case and plugging in a $40 FireWire card. It is easily done, but even more easily done by the service techs at your local electronics shop for an extra 15 bucks or so.

--A DIGITAL VIDEO (DV) CAMCORDER These days only digital camcorders are worth considering, especially the kind that shoot to matchbox-size miniDV tapes in the DV format. DV (not to be confused with DVD) can display home video with more clarity than commercial DVDs from Blockbuster--and miniDV tapes offer home editors more options. Until a year ago, nearly all camcorders stuck to the DV format, but the consumer-electronics giants have been launching models with their own new formats and are confounding the market with a home-video standards war. If you want to easily edit what you shoot, stick to the widely supported DV format--at least until the companies that make editing software decide which of the new formats they'll provide tools for. Meanwhile, prices of DV camcorders are dropping markedly--good ones can be bought for less than $500. See the box on page 214 for my picks.

GETTING STARTED

Stage 1 of the project for Todd's relatives began the first night over dinner. Computers capture video in real time, so we needed a four-hour stretch to get all of Bianca on my computer's hard drive. Transferring video from a DV camcorder to a computer is a simple process that requires no more than plugging one end of the FireWire cable into the camcorder and the other into the computer. Newer computers will automatically recognize camcorders once the cable is hooked up--the usual camcorder controls pop up on-screen. We connected Todd's camcorder to my Hewlett-Packard Windows XP Media Center PC (it's equipped with FireWire), swapped tapes in and out, and let them run while we chowed down on dinner.

Of course, the tape doesn't just dump into a digital hole. It's a good idea to choose which software program to edit with before the capture begins. If you go beyond the pre-installed freebies with one of the new software editing programs, your creative options expand--you can add more transitions, including 3-D effects that change scenes by converting the last frames of one scene into a flying windowpane or bouncing ball that exits the screen as the new scene comes in behind. Many programs are excellent, so shop on price. We used two: Pinnacle Studio 8 ($100, pinnaclesys .com), for the first pass at an edit and muvee autoProducer 3 ($50, muvee.com) for the finishing touches.

What I like about Pinnacle Studio 8 as a starting point is its straightforward layout and the logical way it helps to organize projects. As video dumps into the program for the first time, Studio 8 separates the raw footage into scenes by monitoring the time code on the camera. The code breaks every time the record button has been pushed on or off, and the footage in between is saved as its own distinct scene.

The program then generates a virtual book of all your scenes, each one represented by a small snapshot of whatever led it off. Once the tape is captured and parsed, you simply pick the scenes you want to use, drag them to a timeline on the bottom of the screen and string them in the order you want. Then you can go into each scene and trim it, split it into shorter pieces or duplicate it to appear at different times in your movie.

CUTTING AND PASTING

Happily, the footage Todd brought was brilliant. All four hours were recorded in Betti's hometown in northeastern Italy during Bianca's first visit with relatives, most of it shot during the warm glow of a late Italian summer. Fellini could not have had a better cast. There was Betti's brother--a hunky Club Med recreation director--her ever-hugging mother and aunts, and the great-aunt, short and wide in a black dress, with the gift of making Bianca smile. Todd let the camera run over every course of a big dinner where the family passed plates as fast and acrobatically as fighter jets in a dogfight.

It took me 20 minutes to show Todd the rudiments of Studio 8, after which I let him assemble and trim the scenes he wanted. Be ruthless, I urged. Four hours later (Todd said it killed him), he had cut to the bare minimum: a movie that was an hour and a half long. I sent Todd to his hotel, after getting his permission to play a little.

Like most editing programs, Studio 8 lets you zip through saved clips quickly. You just click on them with your mouse, and they appear in an editing window, where you can cut them. It took me half an hour to trim Todd's movie to 11 minutes. I also put in some slow fades between scenes that were particularly disjointed and inserted a title, "Bianca's First Visit to Italy." Now all I needed was the right song.

BEHIND THE MUSIC

I shocked myself at the abundance of Dean Martin and Louis Prima songs in my collection, but I realized that since I had become my family's videographer, I'd been prowling used-CD shops and the bargain bins of Tower Records for anything that might someday make a good soundtrack. It's amazing how a lifelong loathing of Lawrence Welk can turn into admiration when you're scoring footage of a junior high swim meet with "Bubbles in the Wine." Nearly every video-editing program now lets you import music from a CD or digital music file, like an MP3. For Bianca's star turn I chose "That's Amore" from The Best of Dean Martin. (I once would've been surprised that such a collection could take up a whole CD.)

Todd was duly thankful, although my slash job left him a little unhappy. Nonetheless, he liked the idea of sending out the shorter movie for the holidays.

It takes time for even a fast computer to translate digital footage from one file format--in this case miniDV--to another. Todd thought a DVD would make the most sense, since all his relatives have DVD players but not all have computers. That meant letting the computer run for half an hour while it converted the movie into the file format used to create standard DVDs, called MPEG-2. My HP Media Center PC came with a DVD burner, and it took maybe 15 more minutes to transfer the film to a DVD through Pinnacle Studio 8. Other programs, such as Movies on CD & DVD ($40, magix.com), can turn DV footage into a finished DVD far more quickly. The disk played perfectly on my DVD player. Todd left happy, but the Ang Lee in me still wanted to fuss, to make a video Todd would really love. And with a good editing program or two, and a plan, it was possible.

The next day I loaded the finished movie into muvee autoProducer 3. This may be one of the most fun and easy-to-use programs. It takes your footage and, using an artificial-intelligence engine built into the software, cuts, rearranges and applies special effects. You can choose any number of themes. For Bianca's video I picked a slow romantic one. I also changed the music, plugging in Puccini melodies played by an old-fashioned Italian marching band. Muvee slowed down the action just enough to highlight everyone's expression as the aunties bounced Baby Bianca. In the food scene, the video lingered on the family's joy as each enormous dish made its way from kitchen to table. And the glorious music. It was so perfectly, well, Italian, I feared I might be charged with creating a cartoon. Muvee autoProducer 3 can also save video to MPEG-2 format so you can burn it on a DVD. I sent off the final version on a disk to Todd, but I also opened it in Movie Maker 2 and saved the movie in Microsoft's own Windows Media Video format, which makes it perfect for e-mail.

"Betti cried," Todd told me later on the phone. "She sent it to her mom, and her mom cried too." Perfect. "They all did have a complaint, though." Oh, no. What ignorant cultural snafu had I committed? "Everyone thinks," Todd said with a gentle reprimand of an old friend, "that the movie was too short."

I'm sending Todd his own video-editing software for Christmas.

TED C. FISHMAN WRITES ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER SCREEN IN CHICAGO.