Tech Questions

[lola]

 Hi all! It's time to talk about technology! Let's crowdsource our knowledge and use this as a place we can connect to each other to figure things out.

For those of you have already decided on your editing software, what are you planning to use?

And for those of you just starting out,  For those of you just starting out, what hardware (Mac, PC, chromebook, ipad?) are you planning on using? Have you tried any editing software before? 

Here are some resources we shared last year.... let's update this list as we go! (We've also added a few specific tutorials for some of the vexercises...)

Here are a couple of lists of software options: 
Free
Full list with prices listed

FWIW, last year for the vexercises I (Lola) used Davinci Resolve and actually really loved it. It's free, and just as powerful as Premiere, but felt more intuitive to me. 

I've also heard good things about Wondershare Filmora as a somewhat affordable and intuitive first step video editing software. 

A few decent tutorials on YouTube: 
Excellent Davinci Resolve Tutorial
Another Davinci Resolve Tutorial
A whole tutorial playlist on Filmora 
LumaFusion Tutorial for Beginners

Also, there are some great affordable tools for screengrabbing and downloading (like, from YouTube).

4K downloader is stellar for getting HQ files from YouTube, though I'd recommending getting premium to get the 1080p HD files...
and Movavi is great for screencapturing things, well, playing on your screen

We can add to this list as we find more and get a sense of what software folks are using!

Comments

[allheadybooks]

Oof, clipping really takes forever. I think the process depends somewhat on what software you’re using. I’m working in Premiere, which makes it pretty easy to flip back and forth between clipping and placing vids on a timeline, since you can clip within the program (by marking beginning and end points in the source video and labeling your clip with some keywords).

So I tend to spend a few hours scrubbing through the source video and pulling enough clips to give me a broad idea of what kinds of visual trends and patterns I have to work with. Then I place some of those on the timeline, ideally creating some anchor points that I’m sure about, and filling in between them with maybes or randomly chosen clips just to play around. (I divide these between two video tracks in Premiere: V1 for clips I’m sure about and V2 for possibilities I’m playing around with, dragging them down to V1 once I’m sure they’ll work.) When I run out of stuff to place or realize I need some wide establishing shots or a closeup of an eye or something specific like that, I go back to clipping! They’re pretty mutually inspiring processes—I don’t know what to clip unless I have a sense of the arc of the vid, and I can’t imagine an arc for the vid unless I know what shots I have to choose from—so alternating between them works best for me.