Video Editing Software Choices
Mar. 18th, 2020 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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
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!!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-18 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 02:45 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:20 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 07:08 am (UTC)FCP is just plain out of my budget and will likely remain so.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:39 pm (UTC)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!!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-27 08:03 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:30 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 12:08 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 03:40 pm (UTC)BUT it looks like Resolve does a similar tagging thing, so I am totally going to try that!!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-21 09:56 pm (UTC)And agree that iMovie is good. And free!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-20 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-26 03:14 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2020-03-26 03:44 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-26 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-27 03:06 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-29 02:45 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-29 02:54 am (UTC)https://github.com/alexwlchan/clipatron
no subject
Date: 2020-03-27 08:12 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-29 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-04 05:25 am (UTC)…but it does not work like I remember