Video editing program

[Ean Austral]

Gday All,

I recently bought a drone and it uses a micro SD card. I have never done any video editing so wondering if the guru's can recommend a very basic program , preferably free download , that will enable me to edit out the bad footage and keep the good stuff. Maybe once I master that I will look at linking the good bits together with music - if my simple brain works thru it that is.

Cheers Ean

PS I have the adaptor thing that you put the micro card into to make a normal size SD card

[AK83]

If you have a Windows PC, I'd say just try using M$s Movie Maker.
It's a default install on Win 7 and 8, and may be optional when installing Win10.
If you have Win10, and don't have Movie Maker, go to the store and download it.

FWIW: it's not a good video editing program, but made for people with zero skill and for those with very little interest as well.

ie. as long as you know where you have your video files saved too, I doubt you'll go wrong in using it. That is, it's very basic and you'll outgrow it very quickly.

Once you get to the point where you want to do more than Movie Maker allows, at least you'll have some experience up your sleeve to know which freeware software will be better for you.

[Bytemrk]

Ean, this gives you a few suggestions:

The best free video editor 2018 | TechRadar (https://www.techradar.com/au/news/software/applications/the-best-free-video-editor-1330136)

I've messed around with the free version of DaVinci Resolve in the past, which seemed OK - but I haven't really done much video editing.

[AK83]

I've done a fair amount of video editing(years back), and thinking back to when I first started .. I'd say that a full featured video editing program may be counter productive for Ean's needs(to begin with)
By his own admission, he's never done it, and wants basic.

Hence why I suggested Movie Maker.
It's workflow is a 'guided tour' method, which helps the inexperienced.
With all the others you need a basic understanding of how to 'build a project'.

For a more full featured editor, I'd go with Tech Radar's recommendation of shotcut.

[Homestar]

I started with Movie Maker and it works fine for what I do and I also have AVS Video Editor (cheap I think but maybe not free) on a crappy old laptop - which also does what I need it to do as well. AVS has little built in video guides as well which was handy for a novice like me. Not sure if either are any good if you want whiz bang stuff but for chopping up a file from a drone or similar, adding a few bits and pieces they both works ok and were easy enough to get my head around after a bit of playing, but I'm certainly no expert - far from it.

[Homestar]

Well I retract what I said about Movie Maker - I can't keep the bloody program running long enough to make it work much, and what I do manage to do seems to render incorrectly when I save it so the transitions and other features are incorrect when I have finished.

Will try something else - I am trying to do 4K video at the moment which seems a bridge too far for it (The machine I'm running it on doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat with all performance data showing it's idling away while working on things). Even a click to another part of the video will see it crash and close.

Any suggestions on fixing this?

I'll download DaVinci Resolve and see what that's like.

[Tins]

Check out LightWorks. It is absolutely brilliant, is fully featured and best of all, it's free for single, non commercial users. It has been used to make full production cinema release movies, but is perfectly accessible by amateurs.

Lightworks: The professional editor for everyone (https://www.lwks.com)

[Tins]

Also, Movie Maker is no longer supported by MS since 2012 I think, and cannot be downloaded except from 3rd party sites. MS warns against this.

[p38arover]

Maybe try this: avidemux download | SourceForge.net (https://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux/)

This week's Community Choice on Sourceforge.

[Homestar]

Thanks for that guys, but I already downloaded Davinci Resolve and it's bloody good. High end so will take some time to learn all the features but easy and quick to cut together what I needed and quite intuitive. Stable and didn't pack up on me, render of a 1080P HD video of about 3 minutes took around 7 minutes, so pretty happy with how my sons old gaming laptop handled that, but I shouldn't be too surprised as it was over $4K to build just a year or so ago. Now my new little toy to go along with the Mavic Pro. The ultra wide Predator monitor makes multi tasking easy without needing 2 monitors as well. [smilebigeye]

Just uploading the results to Youtube then I'll post the results. Nearly 3 gig file so taking around 10 minutes to do that.

[timax]

The free version of resolve if you can get your head around it is a great program even for a pro.

[Landy Smurf]

I use movavi. It is not free though. I am happy enough with it as it is easy enough to use and can do 4K.
This was the last video I put together that used the drone.

https://youtu.be/n_c0AWHi8g4

[Homestar]

Well, what a difference a day makes. Starting to get the hang of some of the nicer features in DaVinci. Below is this mornings efforts. I did do another one with this footage in Movie Maker but it was pretty crappy. Done a bit of fiddling with the colour balance and contrast on some of this as the original footage wasn't great - I need to learn how to set the camera up now so I can get better raw footage to start with.


https://youtu.be/S9tOnQ0cmrg