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

[salamandras]

This is so very helpful! Thank you so much for sharing your process. If I think of it as a task unto itself as you describe it, I can see going through my source video being a fun project. The whole idea of a structured creative visual process is so new to me.

I really appreciate you sharing your keywords, too! My brain wants to be super organized and then struggles coming up with organizational structures, so I will definitely start with yours.

[allheadybooks]

No problem! Yeah, this hobby is a much more structured kind of creativity than I’m used to, with so much technical/process mastery to do before you get to the fun stuff. But once I got a flow worked out for clipping, I do find it fun because describing the clips through keywords sparks ideas for me and helps me see parallels and trends across shots. Last year’s vexercises gave me a good kick in the ass to get a system worked out, in that the quick deadlines meant I had to just try stuff and practice without being too much of a perfectionist!

[salamandras]

I hope you don't mind me asking a follow up question - Do you find it useful to be super specific and give a ton (maybe even an excess) of keywords? Or does that bog the process down?

I figure it would be better to be more specific for later, when I use the search feature, but I know from past experience I tend to get too ambitious and then give up when I over-complicate things.

[allheadybooks]

Hm, I think this is one of those things that you figure out as you go. So for Atomic Blonde, that movie is huge on stylistic colored lighting, and the protagonist wears a bunch of different wigs throughout the movie, so I always note that, but I wouldn’t necessarily for another source. I also love to emphasize movement and make dance-like vids so I always record direction of movement, where another vidder might not. A typical keyword string (which I just punch in as the name of the clip, although I know some people use the metadata fields in Premiere) might look like:

Lorraine walks toward camera sunglasses blonde in hallway with strip lights green

Percival punches cop left to right then flips him in front of car headlights fight alley night wide shot

Pan across city skyline superspeed exterior night

So I don’t hit every one of those categories for every shot, just the relevant ones, and I by no means try to be comprehensive! It’s more like, what am I noticing most about this shot, and I jot those things down because later on I might need to find more night shots, or close-ups, or fight scenes. And you’ll figure out as you go what aspects of the source are interesting to you, and tag those more thoroughly (Hannibal has a bunch of disturbing nature images so I always tagged those with ‘nature’ and the murder art pieces with ‘murder’). Make sense?

[salamandras]

Oh, yes, this is incredibly helpful, thank you!