Video editing software

[Anne]

(I'm no Peter Jackson nor even in the same league as @Anne so this may take some time and will be pretty basic)

Hey, if I can help I'd be glad to.

Thanks for the offer - just now it's mostly time that I need, but I am puzzling over one thing, the best format to convert my files to.

I use something called PCCAM to capture video/audio input (can't recall where I got it from, but it allows me to run multiple simultaneous video capture to my drive, which is useful) this plays back fine using some software called VLC (V2.2.1).
The biggest challenge is the file sizes (lots of Gb) so I like to switch formats for posting and to reduce the stress on my laptop which is still creaking a bit with all the processing power.

But.... I seem to have all sorts of issues with the sound if I convert to anything other than a WMV+WMA type (for example  H.264+MP3 is great video but no sound) and WMV for reasons I cannot comprehend challenges any attempt to edit the movie basically being in-recognised by the usual video editing tools.

Any suggestions or tips?

MJ

Some formats are better suited for editing, others, have (or used to have) good quality for the filesize and are easy for a pc to play back but are not fit to edit. Check what the preferred format of your editor is and use that. Most tools will gladly use Apple Quicktime, altough it's a proprietary format it used to be a defacto standard but it's dated now. My camera outputs h264 (MPEG-4) encoded files with AC3 audio, this is compressed but perfectly fine for editing. I think most cheap consumer cameras will use this format today. If I want to do some fancy stuff I extract all the frames from the video to png files. These are uncompressed so I'm getting the exact same quality as the original file but I can edit images in stead of video. I use Kdenlive and this will load a series of images and treats it like it's a video file. The audio I take from the original source and just put it back in, then export to whatever format suits your target audience best.

[Like Ra]

How to convert from MP4 to WEBM using ffmpeg:

VP8: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/VP8

Code:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis output.webm

VP9: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/VP9

Code:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 1M output.webm

VP9 Two-Pass encoding:

Code:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 1M -pass 1 -speed 4 -c:a libopus -f webm /dev/null && \
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 1M -pass 2 -speed 1 -c:a libopus output.webm

[Like Ra]

Interesting article about the history and current status of various non-linear video editors:

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry...eo-editors

[Like Ra]

Have to mention Handbrake here (open source video transcoder): https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

[Like Ra]

I had to make a small informational video for my parents. Usually I just point&shoot with a smartphone, then send via WhatsApp and done, but this time I had to combiner several clips, crop&zoom some of them, tweak audio, remove boring parts, etc. The challenge was to achieve what I want without any tutorials. This was my first EVER video editing experiment. I went through openshot, handbrake, blender, kdenlive, vidcutter, and the winner is .... Kdenlive!!! The rest either do not have the functionality I needed (or I could not find it, or separate plugins should be installed), or it was very unintuitive (blender). The audio editing I did in Audacity (the audio separation in Kdenlive is very easy - just one click).

So, I'm not videovirgin anymore! 😁 Next step is to watch some basic blender and kdellive tutorials. Any recommendations?

[essanym]

Next step is to watch some basic blender and kdellive tutorials. Any recommendations?

What do you want to make in blender?

[Like Ra]

What do you want to make in blender?

Simple things, just what I mentioned above. Several clips, some overlay text, several tracks of both video and audio, crops, zooms.

[Like Ra]

https://otsaloma.io/gaupol/ - Gaupol - an excellent subtitle editor, which van be used for translations and subtitle conversions.

[latexkid99]

Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects user here. 😊

Just had a quick look at Kdenlive and seems like quite a featured-packed software. Pretty impressive for free and open source software. Will have to keep this in mind when recommending programs!

@Like Ra Done much video editing recently?

[jtr765]

I use

Davinci Resolve

, which is available for free in a home version.