video editing....

[Mermaid Avalon]

hi everyone..
Maybe a silly question ( and hopefully one which is easy to answer!)...
I'm having a professional underwater shoot in 3 weeks....I'll be getting a lot of footage and Im wondering how to put it all together, perhaps some slow motion, adding music, etc.
I also ordered an underwater camera, so i know I'll be making more videos on my own in the very near future.
Is there a kind of program that most people use for this kind of thing? How hard is it?
thanks in advance!

[Kanti]

I've thought about video editing for a while and never actually did it.
But I'd just go on youtube and look for tutorials or people using the software and see whichever one looked the nicest or easiest. I hear something called "After Effects" I think it's from adobe, which everyone says is pretty good.

[malinghi]

I just learn something about video editing that explains a ton of the trouble I've had. Every time I try to edit videos it often crashes, or has errors, or can't save the edited video. I've tried tons of different editors but none of them seem to work. Evidently I think one of my problems is that most videos are in formats that compress the file to save space and make it easy to transfer, but most video editing required large uncompressed formats since the editors work by changing stuff on a frame by frame basis. I think you need to convert the files into programs that are better for editing, and then convert them back to formats that are good for sharing and distributing once you're done.

At least I think that's how it works. Can anyone who has had success editing videos let me know?

Here's where I got my info:
http://blogs.telestream.net/screenflow/2012/04/save-yourself-frustration-use-editing-formats-when-editing/
http://dpbestflow.org/Video_Format_Overview
http://www.reelseo.com/basics-web-video-file-formats-video-containers/

[Mermaid Caidence]

I use windows live movie maker. Really easy to use, decent effects. Sometimes crashes or glitches if I have the program open for a long time, but that's why you save your work often. Adobe after effects costs a lot of money, unless you use the trial version.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MermaidCaitey?feature=mhee
Here's all of my videos that have been edited with windows live movie maker. Might want to see if that's the type of editing you want to do.

[MerEmma]

I use iMovie. It's really nice, haha.

[Winged Mermaid]

When you say professional, I'm assuming you mean 1080-4k range. Be aware some free and easy movie editors can really cut down on the quality when exporting. You can google for different freeware/shareware software depending on what your OS is. Adobe does offer trial versions if you want to try something like Premier Pro or After Effects. If it's "hard" is a relevant term when it comes to computer comfort and ability level, and also varies from software to software. iMovie is rather easy to work with (though also one guilty of cutting down on quality if you're dealing with HD in my experience), but Premier Pro requires some time looking up online tutorials just to understand how to work the basics. The good news is that there are a LOT of online tutorials for that kind of thing, especially Adobe software. Google and Youtube are your friends with that! If you have a problem, question, or want a tutorial, just Goggle for it or search on Youtube and you can find a lot of help :)

I think only better quality video editors can do slow-mo. Though I'm not sure on that. I just know that the reason people have 45-65 fps (frames per second) in their capture settings (when usually when uploading to any social media it automatically cuts down to 30fps) is becuase if you have the higher fps in the raw files when you're editing you can do great slowmo without compromising quality.

Just be careful and pay attention to your computer's state while editing. I don't know what kind of computer you have, so I dont know how well it can handle the software. Big programs like Adobe's stuff, I suggest closing all other programs and maybe even turning off wifi and bluetooth. I have a MacBook Pro from 2008 and I have to use ice packs (the refreezable kind) to keep my computer cool when I'm doing certian stuff rendering on there. I have a program that controls my fans and tells me the temperature of the computer (SMC Fan Control) and I can break 200º while doing some things with the editor. If you computer is too hot for too long it can burn out components. I actually fried a logic board (it was Apple's fault actually so they replaced it) and stuff like that is very expensive to have fixed. Just wanted to make you aware!

[Blondie]

For someone who is just making "simple videos" I would stick with iMovie and Windows Movie Maker. It's just not worth it to spend a lot of money on a program if you're not intending to use it a lot and make professional like videos.

If you're leaning towards a better, more expensive, and professional piece of equipment, I HIGHLY suggest Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro X is the latest addition, and it's more "user friendly". It's like iMovie on steroids but better xD Final Cut Pro 7 is harder to obtain because it's no longer made and for some people, it's absolutely better than 7. Personally, I was a 7 person for a LONG time. I hated the switch to X but now I absolutely love it.

Of course, that's only if you have a Mac. If you have a PC, Sony Vegas is a great movie editor too. It's not as easy as the final cuts, but it's very decent. And then there's Adobe After Effects. Now, this is my take on it. It's not worth it unless you're planning on making graphics like they do in movies. The program is frustrating to learn and it's hard to make effects. (If it was easy, everyone wold be doing it) It's an INCREDIBLY expensive program too.

I'm a media intern and I've been video editing for five years now. My personal pick is final cut X. But that's just my opinion xD

[AptaMer]

Hi Mermaid Avalon,

I've been using a program called TMPGEnc by Pegasys Software.

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/index.html

I converts any format to anything else, like .MOV to .AVI, and in particular it can convert any video format to the MPG/MP2 or PCM audio standard that DVDs use for movies. It can also split files into a separate video stream and audio track, and allows you to fix errors and insert audio, and all that stuff.

The other thing TMPGEnc does is it allows you complete control, even down to manual setting of keyframes, p/i indexing, and when it resizes or converts video you never see a loss of quality, as long as you determine the correct bitrates beforehand.

If I'm making a DVD movie that's playable in a DVD player I use a program called DVD-Lab by Mediachance

http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/index.html

It allows you to completely author DVD movies, with custom menus, scene menus and stuff, just like a commercial DVD ( and unlike the "home movie" type packages that force canned styles and simple DVD layout on you.)

The other people are right that video editing take a lot of computer resources. It can take hours just to compile a 7 GB movie file.

One thing that really speeds up your compiling rate is to use 3 hard drives on your computer. The original video material is on 1 drive, you set your Temp files to be on the 2nd drive, and the new merged/resized output video file gets written to your 3rd drive. The reason this speeds things up is, you get rid of the problem one hard drive has of moving the read/write heads all over the disk to read/write information. When you use 3 drives each file is streamed at the maximum transfer rate of the drive with no so-called seek latency. I found it makes a big difference anyway. You can get a couple of USB external drives for your 2 extra drives. Also, use your fastest computer for this work. It can mean the difference between a big video edit taking all day to run on the computer (like on my old, slow computer) and it getting done in a few hours (on my newer, much faster computer.)