Video editing software, classes, suggestions

Hello folks.

Do you have suggestions for starting slowly but eventually doing some fairly professional video editing jobs on raw digital video clips in order to produce some decent quality video podcasts? I realize that anything is better than nothing and that I should not obsess about editing software but I still do.

I’m a long standing Adobe fan but have been shying away a bit since they went with the software rental model of distribution. However, this may be the best bet. Premiere is their video software but I have not used it. I realize that DMS may have an Adobe license but I’m not currently a member. I was for 5 years but moved and never used it so access to Adobe at DMS is not a factor. But I might be willing to attend classes there.

I have had recommendations for Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve product and the price to purchase is really amazing and the free version isn’t terrible.

I don’t need to do any 3-D rendering, so I don’t need a product like Blender but I have seen that mentioned here.

Thanks - DJ

Davinci Resolve is mostly for color grading. There are pros and cons to the software subscription model. Adobe Creative Cloud is cheaper than it seems at first, much cheaper than the perpetual Creative Suite licenses used to be when you factor in trying to keep up with upgrades. Even with an outrught purchase and no upgrades it would take over three years to break even.

If you plan to work with other people or stuidos most will be using Premiere. A few will be using Final Cut Pro. If you don’t care about compatibility with other workflows and just want a decent editor for a reasonable price then checkout Lightworks.

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That’s some great advice, Luke. Thank you.

So Davinci Resolve isn’t really an editing suite? Ha, shows what I know. Hard to tell from looking at their web site what it really does. But, yes, there was lots about color management.

Would DaVinci be used with Premiere, for ex?

Hmmm, I may have to bite the bullet and just get Premiere. I work with Baylor University Hospital. Maybe I can wrangle some sort of discount out of Adobe.

I have been so used to having Adobe CS for years. It serves me well until I must upgrade because of OS compatibility but I’ve never used the video editing component, only PS. I guess with video formats advancing constantly, one might have to have a continually upgraded package like Premiere. Is that right?

Final Cut doesn’t look too bad. What are your thoughts about it?

This is my day-job so…

http://www.avid.com/media-composer-first
Free-as-in zero dollars. Can be a touch intimidating at first, but is well liked by many and a real industry standard. The free version’s limitation is that you can only have 3 working projects at any one time (unless you pay). For most casual users, this isn’t a problem.

There is a monthly Davinci resolve users group meeting at the Makerspace as well, so that’s a great resource in case you want to go that direction. It’s editing tools leave something to be desired, but it’s really nice to be able to CC and Finish all in one application. It’s also free, unless you need certain filters or effects, most of which are the more advanced ones, not really needed for

I’ve had a number of customers decide to move away from Premiere lately for various reasons, but it’s still one of the top selections. $600/year is negligible when people decide that they also need to have After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator etc… there are free or low cost alternatives and people ARE really starting to look in those directions, but Adobe carries a big stick in this industry for sure.

Final Cut is sort of languishing. It’s not actually a bad program, but being tied to the Apple platform is now actually hurting them as opposed to helping. Apple has largely walked away from the ‘real’ video production market. There certainly are people producing some good content with it, and it’s great for certain types of production, but lacks in others.

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Apple seems to have walked away from almost all “real” professional markets. They’ve basically abandoned their tower solution, which wasn’t really a tower solution in the first place.

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Adam - Thanks for the info! I’ll look into the avid product as well.

And re Apple products, this vid may summarize it well when you need plenty of CPU power. I am certainly and Apple fan have old machines and perhaps a PC or Linux box is in my future if I’m going to start editing video.

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I still have a 2008 circa MacPro acting as my home theater PC, but it’s really starting to show it’s age. I switched to PC about 2013 and have not looked back.

Apple is supposed to come out with a new ‘modular’ tower in 2019 so we’ll see, but for many, it’s 5+ years too late and they’ve moved on. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/

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I use Camtasia and Sony Movie Studio Platinum.

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@Adam_Oas the paywall prevents us seeing the graph.

I used to use Sony Vegas Pro to do video editing and Sony Sound Forge to do sound editing, I liked both programs and I think they compare well with the Adobe products, Premier and Audition. After a couple of years of consideration, however I finally went with Adobe’s Creative Suite and into my third year, I believe it is a good deal. The past few years they have had a black Friday sale around Thanksgiving where you can get the subscription at a reduced rate (I think $39.95/mo) or you can pay annually for a subscription which costs the same as the reduced black Friday rate.

Adobe has a much wider range of products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, Prelude, After Effects and others all of which integrate very well for making very sophisticated videos.

The problem is that there is a very long learning curve. While you can bang out some video with just a little training, these products have been developed by some of the best in the business and accessing all of their power can be quite complex.

The Lynda.com courses that were offered by DMS for a while were very helpful in learning these programs, DMS no longer offers this. I understand you can get Lynda.com from the Dallas Public Library if you have their library card or you can subscribe to Lynda.com.

In regards to what computer you need to run Adobe CS, Puget Systems constantly researches computer components are needed to run Adobe CS, you can access their research at the link below:

I built my system several years ago following their recommendations and it still works well for the stuff that i am doing.

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Several libraries offer Lynda.com now. Grand Prairie is one. GP does not have a residency requirement to join their library. You can even join on-line. That is a wonderful Library model.

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Arlington does also. I’ve used linda.com and found it very good, bite size modules.

I miss when linda.com allowed DMS to have a subscription (at a reasonable price) - I believe we could have 10 users at a time … @MellissaRhodes I recall was the person that handed out the coveted access for a certain period.

Yeah it was great but Lynda gained in popularity quickly and most of the local libraries offer it now which is wonderful. I remember tracking usage and our members were DEFINITELY taking advantage of the classes offered. Made it a little more difficult for me to cancel with our rep. He just kept showing me how great our numbers were. As a side note, much later after we had canceled the DMS subscriptions, I used it to learn Premiere and it was absolutely fantastic.

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Any interest in teaching any classes in this area?

Truth is that my skillset is on older software packages that are now defunct. I should probably learn some basics to pass on from one or the other of these though. :thinking:

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The free/regular version of Resolve stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Premiere Pro and FCPX. It has different strengths, and there are certainly situations in which one of the other options would be better—but “not terrible” is a massive understatement. I myself switched from Premiere Pro to Resolve (free/regular) about 18 months ago, and purchased Resolve Studio instead of the equally-priced FCPX a few months later to get the (not necessary but really nice) realtime lens distortion removal to save time on a project. You do need a fairly powerful system to run Resolve (see this document).

FCPX and Premiere Pro both come in trial versions, but you will get more out of your evaluation period once you have a few projects under your belt.

Think about it this way: an hour obsessing about which tool to use to cut up pieces of footage and glue them together again is an hour spent not obsessing about something that will actually improve the quality of your product. Most of the skills you will learn are transferrable between packages. Push come to shove, you could probably get by with iMovie for a couple of episodes if you are on a Mac.

By the way, I recommend the following book by Walter Murch:

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Thanks, Grant, for some great info.

What OS are you running for Resolve? Did you build a box just for Resolve?

Wow, that’s a lot of info (system req for Resolve).

I am on a Mac Pro 5,1. Blackmagic recently announced an eGPU you might want to check out if you are on a computer without an upgradeable GPU.

But you don’t need Resolve. If you can’t run it on your current system, I’d probably just start with different software.

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What do you think is used here to cut between and in and out of clips? Some sort of luminance mask? I can only relate to what I know from Photoshop but I guess some of the same principles apply to video mixing. I’m just starting to gather stuff for editing but I like this effect. Is this sort of effect something found at the basic level in Premiere, Resolve or Avid product, for example?

Search for “light leak transition” on any stock footage site and you’ll see a ton of stuff like that. It is an overused effect, but it works sometimes. To get this kind of transition, just make a cut and put your stock footage over the cut, setting the blend mode to screen. Any pro NLE should support this.

I suspect this kind of transition effect was inspired by the raw look of in-camera editing on film cameras, where you tend to get a flash on a cut due to the longer exposure times while the camera is stopping and starting. That approach is still an option too!

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