vexercises | Video Editing Software Choices

lola posting in

So let's talk tech!

For those of you already set on your editing software, what are you planning on using?

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 a couple of lists of current software options that seem pretty comprehensive to me...

Free

Full list with prices listed

Out of these, I (Lola) have used Premiere (what I use now), Final Cut Pro (which I love), and imovie, which is not non-linear and I found very frustrating for vid-making.

I also use the iPad app Lumafusion, which is pretty amazing for an ipad app.

I have heard really good things about Davinci Resolve -- it's free and apparently as powerful or more than Premiere. I'm thinking of downloading it today and trying to make a set of pechakuchas on it, so if anyone wants to join me on that adventure, please do!

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

A few tutorials on YouTube I dug up that seem good:

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 (I'm trying to think, I may have had to go premium to get the 1080p...
and Movavi is great for screencapturing things, well, playing on your screen

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

Comment below with any questions, suggestions, or resources!!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bonibaru

Also: I recently got notification that Adobe is making some of its Creative Cloud functionality freely accessible to students who are learning at home during COVID-19. If your school has paid access that you could have used in a lab, you might now be able to use those creative tools at home. Info here: https://fstoppers.com/news/adobe-offers-free-creative-cloud-packages-students-stuck-home-due-coronavirus-465653

From:

bonibaru

Do you want to add options for capturing source material to use? For example, I like Movavi Screen Capture to snag things I'm watching or listening to on my screen. I used it to just snag the 1 minute of audio for my Pechakuchas without needing to download an entire mp3. Also there is 4K Video Downloader which I have used to get certain shows or music videos or other source materials I need.

From:

lola

Oh yes, I second 4K downloader, which I use constantly! And Movavi screen capture too! I'll add them to the main post :)

From:

extrapenguin

I'm using Kdenlive! It's free and Linux-compatible. IDK how intuitive one would consider it, but it's got an extensive text-base online manual.

From:

anoel

I've seen that Adobe is waiving fees for its monthly program for the next 60 days so definitely something to look into.

From:

naye

Alas, for Premier Pro it's only 7 days (unless other regions have it better).

From:

naye

Thank you for this list! It looks fab. Does anyone have any personal experience/recommendations for the free versions?

From:

wyomingnot

For ten years I used Sony Vegas/Movie Studio (when I broke down and actually paid for my software) on my pc for editing, vdub for making clips.

Then my pc died and I switched to a mac (mini). Then I was at a loss because I had no idea what to use. I needed something free or cheap. I'm not particularly happy with what I've found for making clips (vidcutter), but it works and is free. As for putting things together, I think I've settled on Filmora.

I do have DaVinci Resolve on my drive, but when I first looked at it, I was a bit overwhelmed. I might (Should) go give it another go.

From:

sophie_448

iMovie is honestly very good for a free program (well, included with your Mac OS). I used it for a good while. I eventually did upgrade to Final Cut Pro X, and it does allow for more precise editing and has more bells and whistles. But I would definitely suggest at least taking a look at iMovie if you haven't.

I find it (and FCPX which has a very similar interface) quite intuitive, as is often the case with Mac products. But I'm not sure how it plays for someone coming from a good PC software. I got my first Mac in 2007. The last time I vidded on a PC, I was using Windows Movie Maker and running Windows XP LOL.

From:

bonibaru

I have always heard good things about iMovie for newbies.

From:

sophie_448

It is! I jumped into it a couple years ago after like a decade break from vidding and didn't have much trouble finding my way around. I think I favor a kind of minimalist (?) vidding style, though. I didn't need to figure out much except how to place my audio and video tracks where I wanted them. So that may skew my perception.

From:

bonibaru

That's how I prefer to work, too. Premiere is so complex, but it was the program I started with in 2002 and it's like home to me now. I probably use 10% of its capacity, even though I've started to learn After Effects now just for fun, but it feels like a waste of potential lol

From:

wyomingnot

If it's not non-linear, there's just no point in even playing with it, for me. ;)

FCP is just plain out of my budget and will likely remain so.

From:

lola

Imovie wasn't non linear when I used it back in the day? But it might be now!

I'm trying to learn DaVinci Resolve. I'm still sort of muddling my way around it because some things are different from what I'm used to, but it seems super powerful and nicely designed overall. I'm kind of amazed that it's free!!

From:

franzeska

FCPX is only $299, so realistically, Adobe or Avid or whatever isn't going to be within your budget either. None of the paid options I've used are especially budget-friendly.

Resolve is by far the most obvious choice. (Though I agree that it has so many powerful features that are complete overkill for a vidder that it's kind of bewildering at first glance.)

From:

sophie_448

*waves* I won't have time to join the exercises until/unless I get locked down but! I am a pretty devoted Mac user, and I use Final Cut Pro X. (I *cough* may have acquired it by ~nontraditional means because omg it's $300 yikes.)

Having recently had a lengthy conversation where I was like "I don't know what 'clipping' is? Am I doing vidding wrong??" and now more or less understanding the concept... ish, I will say that FCPX removes the need for clipping (for me). It allows keyword tagging of your source (actually the feature that led me to upgrade from iMovie). And then you can show just the clips that you tagged by clicking on the keyword.

I find the interface very intuitive, although of course as I go on and try different things, I discover even more features.

From:

valoise

I'm glad to see someone else finds the FCPX tagging process eliminates the need for separate software to make clips. Back when Final Cut Express was a thing, I loved it but still needed to make clips to work with. The changes in the user interface with FCPX were extreme, but now that I've gotten used to working with it I love the tagging feature.

I normally have a rough idea of where I want to go with the vid and as I review the source I tag various 'clips' with keywords that are relevant either to specific lyrics in the music or to themes or motions, etc.

From:

bonibaru

This keyword tagging thing sounds AMAZING. I'm a person who sweeps through source and builds folders with clip libraries as I go and label them myself with my own keywords. If my vidding program could search those automatically it would be so much faster.

From:

lola

There are so many things I miss about Final Cut! And I didn't even know about the tagging thing.

BUT it looks like Resolve does a similar tagging thing, so I am totally going to try that!!

From:

sophie_448

I'm gonna be real, I've literally never clipped as many people seem to do. And tbh my tagging usually breaks down well before I actually finish the vid. I've always imported my whole source to work with, separated by episode or by film. And then basically scroll back and forth through it 87 million times until a vid falls out? Even though I've had it explained to me I just can't really wrap my head around the process of like... pre-deciding things before the clips are laid out on the timeline? I mean, obviously I have some things in mind before I start, but not like what I've heard other people describe.

From:

bonibaru

This is a perfectly valid way to vid! In my younger days I did the same thing! Now, though, after many years and many fandoms and advancing age I don't trust my own memory. My clip library serves two purposes: I re-watch the source again (with no sound! It changes how I relate to the images when the audio dialogue & sound effects & scoring is yanked!) and make notes for myself as a vidder instead of a fan while clipping, and I can search for things I might have forgotten exist if it takes me a few weeks to get back to it.

From:

lola

Oh, totally, I never clip!! I just don't have the patience. If someone gives me clipped files, then I'll use them and it can be awesome, but I also just love the feeling of more intuitively running through the footage and seeing what inspireds me! Until a vid falls out, LOL, that's totally it!

From:

nyctanthes

Oh my goodness. I've been trimming/clipping using QT, but QT doesn't work anymore for this. So if I can do it within FCP...I can vid/edit still images again!

And agree that iMovie is good. And free!

From:

gwenfrankenstien

I use iMovie because it's free and comes with my computer. I'm intimidated by the learning curve of switching to something more powerful. Like the person upthread, I haven't vidded on a PC since the Windows Movie Maker days.

From:

sophie_448

iMovie is quite good! I can say from experience that if you feel comfortable with it, you wouldn't have a hard time transitioning to FCPX if you wanted to. They're built on essentially the same interface, so it immediately feels very familiar to work with and you can do the basics with basically no learning curve at all. There are a few things I've had to google, but not too much. And there are neat little upgrades that save a lot of time. Like for slow mo, in iMovie you have to specify a percentage speed and then it adjusts the clip. For me this often meant making repeated tiny adjustments to get the clip to fit into the exact space that I wanted. With FCPX you do Cmd+R and then you can literally just drag the clip to shrink or expand until it's the right size. Handy little things like that!

From:

melannen

I am starting basically from scratch here (given that the last time I vidded, half the kids were still using VHS footage.)

I have DaVinci Resolve to try and HandBrake to rip and I know Audacity pretty well, but how do you clip these days? And what video formats should I be ripping, clipping, and exporting to? mp4?

From:

lola

Yay!! Welcome!!
I'm learning & loving DaVinci Resolve--I'm excited to find other ppl who are using it too!
Handbrake to rip is great, and yes, mp4 seems to be the most versatile format for editing.
I actually don't clip... I just use the whole files most of the time. But on Resolve you can make subclips I believe or tag scenes/sections, which essentially functions as clipping. I haven't tried it yet but I'm planning on it!! If I find some good tutorials on it I will share them.
Other folks who clip may have suggestions and workflow for how they do it though... I know most people do clip.

From:

melannen

I've never clipped before either, but it does seem like it would be useful with the way I organize things, especially if I'm using the same source multiple times!

From:

seekingferret

Okay, clipping, a guide:

1) If you imagine the classic image of a filmstrip, you have a bunch of individual frames that have separately been captured and they move through the projector one at a time at some frame rate and that's the film.

That's not how digital video generally works. It's possible, that's something called lossless video, but that takes up a lot of memory and isn't really necessary for playback. The trick is that in a continuous sequence of frames, most of the pixels in a frame don't change, or don't change very much, from frame to frame. So most video codecs don't waste memory storing every single frame. They store some frames, which are called Keyframes, and then they store the differences between one Keyframe and the next, and then when the decoder codec sees the video it uses that difference information to recreate the intermediate frames.

That's great for playback, but it can be a pain in the neck for vidding, because you want to be able to cut at any frame, and if you happen to cut at a frame that isn't stored as a full frame, your editor has to do more processing before it displays that frame. Back in the olden days when I started vidding, if you didn't convert your footage from the delivery codec either to a fully lossless codec or to what's called an intermediate or editing codec, you were pretty likely to suffer endless and seemingly random crashes.

But the problem is that lossless codecs and editing codecs require more hard drive space than lossy codecs do, and also back in the olden days of vidding hard drive space was much more scarce than it is today. So the solution was, rather than transcoding your entire source to an editing codec, to only transcode the specific sections of source you actually were going to need in your vid. Hence clipping.

Clipping is a lot less necessary these days both because hard drive space is less scarce, so it's easier to just transcode your whole source to an editing codec unless you're dealing with truly mammoth sources, and also because it seems like editing software has gotten better at dealing with lossier codecs without crashing, which probably is a combination of better codecs, smarter editing software and also more powerful processors in peoples' computers that are able to do the decoding of intermediate frames faster and more effectively. But I don't know the actual reasons, that's just a guess, I just know that people don't seem to be having problems they used to have with just editing from the random xvids grabbed off TPB. But note there are still problems with using that random xvid you grabbed off TPB- you're still more likely to see ghost frames and other glitchiness.

2) Codecs and file formats. Avi and Mp4 and Mkv and Mov are container formats, not codecs. There are multiple different codecs that can be used to encode video that is stored in any given container format. It's really the codec that matters to the vidder, not the container, although some programs do work better with some container formats for reasons that are beyond my knowledge as a vidder.

I don't entirely feel confident in my knowledge of vidtech to recommend a particular codec as best. The two main pro-level editing codec sets are Apple ProRes and Avid's DNXHD/HR... those are both sets of codecs, there are lots of settings and choices and figuring out which to use when is something of a mystery to me, but when I am having trouble otherwise with video I usually find it's worth the time to figure out juuust enough to transcode to one of those. The rest of the time, I tend to use Motion-JPEG as my codec when clipping, which may not be the best choice anymore but it works okay for me because it's simple and editable. And like I said, it's gotten more and more possible to just work with the delivery codecs directly in the editor, and some editing software has tools, of varying utility, to do the organizational parts of clipping nondestructively within the program. So sometimes I skip clipping altogether when I don't care that much.

3. In any case, when I clip, I use Avidemux, which is more powerful than what I use it for but for my purposes is basically a graphical interface wrapper around ffmpeg, which is a powerful command line program for video manipulation and conversion. Avidemux lets me pick in and out points on the video, apply filters, and transcode both video and audio, or strip out the audio if I prefer. When I first started vidding there were good tutorials for using Avidemux for vidding but I think they 404 now, so if you have questions feel free to ask.

From:

melannen

Thank you! That answered most of my questions. I did my first exercise just using DaVinci resolve on all the default settings and it was so, so much smoother than I remember. (also I *really* don't have to worry about having enough space for my source. :D )

I think I'd still like to have a clip library if I start really vidding, because I don't have the kind of memory that lets me find clips easily, but I think I one thing I learned from the first exercise is that I need to figure out how I use clips before that's worth it.

From:

seekingferret

bessyboo recently linked to a python script someone wrote that lets you build a spreadsheet of timestamps and use it with ffmpeg to autoclip all the timestamps, fwiw. I haven't tried it yet but I'm finding it sounds like an appealing option as I work on planning a Grey's Anatomy vid.

https://github.com/alexwlchan/clipatron

From:

franzeska

I never clip in a separate program anymore. The only reason I used to was because of technical limitations.

Instead, I could make subclips inside of my program (lol, like I'd have the patience) or I could scrub through all of my source and chuck anything likely onto a brainstorming timeline. I then edit things from the brainstorming timeline onto my actual vid timeline.

Resolve should be able to handle you importing 10 seasons of TV into one project just fine. Most modern programs have copious metadata options, though the tagging isn't usually quite as elaborate as FCPX's version. You can totally do your clipping within your actual project file.