Tuesday, March 4, 2014

We are video blogging now & review of the video editing software we use.

Elisabeth and I have started a Video blog about our Nomadic Life Style, to go with her blog Adventures in a Hallway.
Here is the first video.


Here is a short aerial Video of the RV park we are living in this week.


I made this video just playing around with my Quadrotor camera set up and the new version of Corel Video Studio 6. Which is the old Ulead software.

I started digital video editing in the mid 90s with Premiere, and over the years have tried several different video editing packages including Ulead. In these days of smart phones it seems like everyone is dumbing down their software.

Of course you need a Mac for Final cut, which I have but its latest version is hardly more then iMovie, not nearly the powerhouse it used to be. Final cut pro always took to long to render anyway.

Pinnacle Studio was pretty good software in its day and still has some nice features. one of my favorite being how easy it can add background music. I keep the latest version 17 on my machine as a go to for some things.
But like Apples Final cut Avid is dumbing it down to. Maybe I just cant get use to the new interface. But honestly I don't need nor want it to track all my videos for me. I put my lasted clips in a folder until I finish my project then file them all on my external drives by year and subject matter like I always have.... I have way to much video for one of these apps to try and track.

Adobe Premiere is still great software and who doesn't love After Effects. The problem is you can't spend the small fortune it takes to own (use it) once buying your upgrade every 2-4 years anymore. Now you have to pay $50 a month to use it. Being self employed when I'm having a good month I can go spend a few hundred on software if I need it, but during a lean month I may need that $50 for something else. That goes for Dreamweaver as well. I used it from version 1 (before Adobe owned it). If they want me back as a customer they need to go back to allowing you to buy a license 1 time and using it for a few years before buying the update instead of the monthly crap.

Finally my main goto software for video editing these days is Corel Video Studio Pro. It has the same old easy to use and under stand interface they all used to. Simple with all the power you want at your fingertips easy to find. I Love the motion tracking, and there is a great selection of plug ins that I love as well.  I normally don't put so much frilly stuff in a video like the one above but I was playing with the software to show some things to a friend with no intentions of posting it to everyone. My wife and everyone liked it and asked me to post it so I did. Not my best work but fun all the same.

Sonicfire Pro is great for generating background music and it's what I used in the RV Park video above.

Bottom line, use what your comfortable with. For me thats a windows machine with Corel Video Pro Ultimate and Sonicfire Pro.


More Video to come, which I guess means I will be blogging more as well as doing reviews for the things we have tried and that we use.


Take Care,
 Mike

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