Best video editing software.

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Cosmo
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PostBest video editing software.
by Cosmo » Thu Nov 05, 2015 9:48 pm

As I'm 26 and currently doing next to nothing with my life I've decided I'd quite like to have a go at editing. After balking at the price of a media production course at the local college I'm looking to get some software to fiddle with at home. It'd be PC so Final Cut is out.

See, Sykes, I did it.

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chalkitdown
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by chalkitdown » Thu Nov 05, 2015 10:17 pm

In the ol' Motorstorm Monday days I used to use a (yaar'd) version of Sony Vegas and it was quite good. Really in-depth but fairly simple to get to grips with the basics. There are loads of tutorials out there, too.

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KK
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by KK » Thu Nov 05, 2015 10:23 pm

There's Adobe Premiere Pro & Adobe After Effects.

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Cosmo
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Cosmo » Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:04 am

Thanks, guys. :D

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abcd
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by abcd » Fri Nov 06, 2015 9:55 am

I've been using Adobe Premiere for a while now, and it's pretty easy to get to grips with.

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Cosmo
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Cosmo » Fri Nov 06, 2015 3:35 pm

abcd wrote:I've been using Adobe Premiere for a while now, and it's pretty easy to get to grips with.


Ta, Stu.

Adobe does seem to be the software of choice for most people it seems.

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Green Gecko
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Green Gecko » Fri Nov 06, 2015 4:16 pm

Adobe premier is arguably superior to Final Cut 7 nowadays anyway and easier to use. I own and use both.

You can also try Sony Vegas or the free version of Lightworks, which has been used to edit films like Pulp Fiction and the Wolf on Wall Street http://www.lwks.com

I think there is (or was) a free version of Avid as well, which is what you would probably use in the broadcast industry.

Premiere is the most generalist. If you did go to college you could license premier for about a tenner a month for 1 year with an educational discount, but bear in mind that's still £120 for a finite license.

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chalkitdown
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by chalkitdown » Fri Nov 06, 2015 8:28 pm

Paying for software lol

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Green Gecko
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Green Gecko » Sat Nov 07, 2015 12:01 am

If you make a living off it you need to know it works.

For example I updated creative cloud once and it nuked the entire suite, but Adobe support had it fixed in 20 mins.

Expenses are also useful to reduce your tax liability.

But yeah, software vendors should do what Autodesk do and allow anyone to register for a free educational license regardless of status. And Lightworks is a professional grade, free solution. It's only limited to 720p MP4 output, which is fine.

I used to pirate everything but it gets genuinely tiresome when gooseberry fool stops working or the latest warez are like a year out of date. For example something like Adobe Camera Raw won't work with your model, or the mobile apps are locked to subscription accounts.

Apps like Sketch are replacing Photoshop outright for designers. I'd pay £50 or so for something that's well supported and usually includes free updates with new features for a while. The move to subscriptions is generally in response to much better value disruptive startup software houses, and free to use / open source alternatives. So support them.

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Wedgie » Sat Nov 07, 2015 9:37 am

Just as well its PC.

The current Final Cut Pro is dogshit. My work went out and bought a new Mac for my editing job, and despite my warnings that the old FC Pro is miles better and wouldn't work on a new Mac.

They went "surely it isn't a huge change." despite me printing and forward links to the reviews. The new Final Cut Pro is faster in processing videos but the interface is totally basic and unsuitable for the tasks I have for various editing work.

The CEO of the company is furious at the people going ahead with the orders and sided with me (thankfully I saved the print outs and emails concerning, as the people tried to shift the blame on me.)

We are trying boot camp but it turns out that it's limited to Windows and wouldn't work with older Mac OS. Now we are left with hundred of pounds of worthless Mac and software. We are currently looking into abode premier but the costs have to be considered.

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Green Gecko
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Green Gecko » Sat Nov 07, 2015 10:26 am

I'm not aware FC7 doesn't work on current macs? Maybe not the latest version of OSX but it is just limited to 32 bit. There is just no official support or updates, it's considered EOL.

Premier is just as good in most places, if not better. Codec support and real time editing / rendering is far better as well. It has most the incisiveness of fc7 with the fluidity of FCX. It has come a long way since the days of Premier Pro.

One day FCX featureset may catch up with FC7 and premier, but after premier catching up to packages like FC7 for years it has since surpassed it, so I personally wouldn't bother waiting. You can completely customise the layout of premier (something you couldn't really do with fc7 anyway) and map the keyboard shortcuts to be the same to make the transition easier, and you can also import final cut sequences or OMF etc.

Im considering selling my boxed copy of final cut studio 3 (I got it from uni for free) if you ever want to pick it up.

Reinstalling an older OSX isn't too difficult either, just download an ISO or buy one of the retail Mountain Lion disks.

At the moment what I do is produce quick online type things on premier because you don't have to wait for anything to render, and if I'm doing a film I like the focus and robustness of fc7, it just takes forever to do anything unless you use native formats ie DV.

Anyway learning both will probably make you more productive overall as premier is much faster at processing than fc7 ever can be (even without render previews), because it's stuck on 32 bit logic (which also means it can only access about 3GB of RAM). As good as it was it's still dead software.

I really liked used soundtrack pro and DVD Studio Pro alongside Fc7 though. The only thing that was a bit gooseberry fool was Compressor, which is junk compared to Adobe Media Encoder, which does bloody everything quickly, informatively and easily with a myriad of options (but not too many you'd hardly need or weird integration with QuickTime). Even has auto Upload to YouTube (or FTP) that Final Cut X included as a standout feature. ;)

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by That's not a growth » Sat Nov 07, 2015 10:34 am

I used to use FCP on my Mac back before they released X and it was the balls. I'll have to echo other peoples sentiments, you either want Premier or Avid. Premier will integrate easier with After Effects, if you're looking into that too. Avid haven't emailed me yet about their free version which was announced earlier in the year, so I don't think it's out yet, is it? Be worth looking into once it is though.

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by bigcheez2k3 » Sat Nov 07, 2015 11:09 am

Another vote for Premiere Pro here. You can get a 30 day trial from Adobe to see if you like it.

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Green Gecko » Sat Nov 07, 2015 11:14 am

Avid did have a free version several years ago, that they stopped, and I heard recently they will be offering it again but have no idea about that.

Bear in mind Premier Pro and Premier CS/CC aren't the same thing. Originally Premiere split off as "pro" software, but it actually wasn't as good as Premier 6.0. It was a time when Adobe tried to split their software into "elements" and "pro" variants. It's since returned to form when it was repackaged into the Creative Suite (now Creative Cloud), and has improved considerably in the last few years, especially in terms of stability and workflow speed.

Avid is powerful and extremely stable but has the worst ease of use due to its idiosyncrasies from the broadcast industry. It's the kind of thing it helps to have some training in as it's not dumbed down at all, so videos help.

I would give Lightworks a try, since it's free, I have heard a lot of good things about it.

Another thing to bear in mind is, you generally get locked into certain versions of this level of software, so if you for example start with a new version of an app you won't be able to open files in an older version, so try to find some copy that works and stick to it, unless you're going legit in which case there is usually a fix around the corner for software breaking stuff.

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Andrew Mills
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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Andrew Mills » Sat Nov 07, 2015 12:27 pm

Another Adobe CC user here. Although, it's h.264 encoding is a bit slow and bloated. If filesize is important, it's worth reencoding Premier's output in Handbrake (open source - so free) using x.264. Almost identical quality and a 10th of the filesize!

Also, being able to use .PSD files in After Effects is strawberry floating well handy. I can't see myself using any other editing package now as I'm just getting more used to it.

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Green Gecko » Sat Nov 07, 2015 12:34 pm

Final cut studio also has rudimentary support for linked PSD (it's how you build menus in DVD Studio) but it seems to be based on Photoshop 3 or something.

I'm the same, but with AI. Generally the support for linked files between apps in CC is incredibly useful. I have dropped entire, enormous illustrations into InDesign, or puppets made of PSD layers into AE, and had no noticeable performance issues. It's marvel that gooseberry fool works even in this day and age. There is almost no file interchange step anywhere anymore.

If the h.264 output is bloated in your experience just output to a lossless format and encode in another application because otherwise you're encoding twice and spending hours - most the time waiting for a file to render is the encoding of h.264 not the effects (depending on the composition of course).

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Rocsteady » Sat Nov 07, 2015 12:46 pm

Does depend on what you want to do with the knowledge, like gg says Avid's generally used for video journalism/ broadcast

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Andrew Mills » Sat Nov 07, 2015 2:22 pm

You can also pay for CC in a different currency (Russian roubles or Indian rupees are effectively £15-20pm for the full suite). :shifty:

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Andrew Mills » Sat Nov 07, 2015 2:26 pm

Green Gecko wrote:Final cut studio also has rudimentary support for linked PSD (it's how you build menus in DVD Studio) but it seems to be based on Photoshop 3 or something.

I'm the same, but with AI. Generally the support for linked files between apps in CC is incredibly useful. I have dropped entire, enormous illustrations into InDesign, or puppets made of PSD layers into AE, and had no noticeable performance issues. It's marvel that gooseberry fool works even in this day and age. There is almost no file interchange step anywhere anymore.

If the h.264 output is bloated in your experience just output to a lossless format and encode in another application because otherwise you're encoding twice and spending hours - most the time waiting for a file to render is the encoding of h.264 not the effects (depending on the composition of course).

After Effects render options are a bit annoying though as stuff like lower thirds need Alpha channels, so need to dig around the codec options (and then remember to save it as a profile) for ease of use later.

Only learned last week that I can drop compositions inside compositions in AE. Pretty much blew my mind open. Also discovered it puts grouped images from PS into separate compositions (annoyingly).

Still SOOOO much to learn across the whole suite. :dread:

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PostRe: Best video editing software.
by Exxy » Sat Nov 07, 2015 7:57 pm

Used Premiere, Final Cut and Avid at Uni. Premiere is by far the easiest to use, not in a stupid way, just the interface is nice and there's plenty of support online. It's useful to have knowledge of CC as well in case you end up using PS or AE.

Avid's crap. Or, the interface is. Couldn't deal with it. Even after training from editors I couldn't warm to it.

Didn't use Final Cut much, but it seemed ok.

DaVinci Resolve recently added a load of non-linear tools and went free. It's the one that I've been recommended now that I don't get CC for free. It's kind of worth having anyway to learn grading techniques.

Premiere's got it's problems but it's my favourite. I'm looking for work at the moment and 90% of jobs require Premiere (and CC) knowledge, some ask for Avid if you look at broadcast and only a few asked for Final Cut.


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