Why should a writer learn about video editors? The very existence of book trailers tell us why. Even if you have no interest in writing screenplays or documentaries, Youtube or Vimeo are good avenues to promote your book.
While I’m not going to get involved in why or how to make a book trailer (yet!), video editing skills can help keep from spending $250 a video for book trailers (and really, you’d want three different ones per novel).
I’ve tried several of the best professional video editors, and there are some disclaimers. I’m not a professional magazine or website that can summon current editions of Vegas Pro at my whim. I’m a writer who has to pay for all this. So if you’re disappointed that I haven’t spent $20,000 on video editing software, interfaces and panels – keep this in mind. If you’re upset that I only reviewed the ones that have a free option, re-read the paragraph.
I’m also a writer, and only a part time video editor. I’ve made quite a few videos in the past, but honestly I can say the only edits I really knew where jump cuts, and I’d sometimes use a transition to cut the effect. So, don’t expect me to talk in depth about LUT’s, lens correction and extensive color correction – not my field of work. I’m good at putting words together, and my film work looks roughly similar.
Adobe Premiere Rush – I thought I’d give this a try, as I don’t have premiere. Premiere seems to be an industry standard, and my producer used it to good effect. So I thought I’d try Premiere Rush, the free version. It’s kind of odd, because my Adobe account says my license doesn’t cover using Spark, but I’ve done a lot of work in Spark! I’m pretty sure, however, that Premiere won’t have the same mistake.
I downloaded Premiere Rush, and it turned out to be excessively slow to install – over an hour. I raised an eyebrow about that. The interface seemed so simple I wondered that anyone’s excited about Premiere when I can work much faster in Filmora, do more and have better results! Amusingly, I watched a tutorial where some guy filmed himself walking around Paris to music he’d chosen thinking it was French, and actually was Adon Olam, a Jewish synagogue prayer! I had to stop and go back because I was distracted and singing along. I guess my roots were showing!
Comments on the tutorial dismissed it as, “So, this is essentially iMovie?” Well, it does look this way. I probably gave up on it too quickly, but it looked like the stripped down version of Premiere is just too stripped down. Unless I was missing something, most of the Rush version of the program is dedicated to less than what you can do with Windows Movie Maker. I know companies have to make a profit, but the key is to make your software have more features and better features than the free software. If you want me to subscribe to Premiere, then show me the advanced tools. Let me try those for 30 days before it reverts to the light version!
Be advised that Premiere Rush only allows you three renders – and since the first two renders you do on a project end up getting deleted, this essentially means you’re allowed to do only one project in Premiere Rush – and then it will stop working.
I have to suspect if this is the light version – and it’s too light – that Adobe Premiere itself is essentially software for people who don’t really know a lot about software? A lot of big names use it, so I don’t know. It comes with a cloud service so all your work is automatically backed up. I may have to try it again, but I wasn’t a fan. Deleted it the same night.
Lightworks – Complicated to use! Is it good? One of my favorite movies was edited on lightworks, so it must be good. The learning curve was super steep, and that about did me in. I could have hunted Youtube for Lightworks tutorials but the big annoyance is that you had to renew your license every week for it to be free! I’m sure it’s probably worth it to pay $300 to own it.
Lightworks maintains an impressive catalog of movies, documentaries and TV shows that have been edited with it, and the terms used in it date back to the old manual film editing days, by using “bins” to store film in. I could see you really needed 200 hours of instruction in it to make film with it – I probably should have learned, but at the time I could do more with PowerDirector and much more quickly.
It looks like Lightworks is very effective, and I was starting to get the feel for creating a pan or a cab or whatever they call it to hold film and edit, but I was put off by the big drawback to it. I might have stuck with it, if they’d get rid of the “re-register your license every 7 days” thing. I know that’s your way to get me to pay $300, but I just don’t have $300 lying around to spend on that!
I guarantee you’ll get good results with it! Just pop in your Braveheart DVD and watch the Bannockburn battle and the extensive editing that was done to make that battle a success! That’s what Lightworks and a good editor can do. If you’ve got the patience to sit through a lot of video tutorials, this may be for you.
Filmora Pro – wow. Again, wow. I made a logo bumper in a matter of a half hour that was phenomenal – but alas, unless you register it, all your renders will have a superimposed Filmora logo and a repeated piano note playing over and over again. This one would have been the stopping point for me – powerful and easy to use, incredible results, but I just don’t have $150 to obtain a license for Filmora Pro. Initial learning curve is low, then quickly gets steep as you begin to learn the more advanced stuff. If you’ve got the money, this one is probably the one you’re looking for. Easy, fast, powerful, and capable of much more than Filmora, which is my go to video editor!
DaVinci Resolve – I tried this a couple of years ago, and like Lightworks the learning curve was really steep. But I don’t have to renew my license every 7 days, so I stuck with it. It has projects you can download to learn editing and coloring. Davinci Resolve has an annoying drawback to it – it seems to balk at 3rd party LUTs, and it tells you over and over again “look up table cannot be found” – even after I installed them to the correct directory and did the appropriate software steps (you have to tell Resolve to rebuild the index of LUTs) and still – “ring around the collar”.
That’s an issue that’s been around for a while, and the parent company needs to address it. I only installed free 3rd party LUTs, and I would HATE to buy 60 LUTs at $59 each and have Resolve chime “ring around the collar!” every time I try using one of my $3700 worth of premium LUTs!
This apparently is Resolve’s only drawback.
Oh, seriously! The interface is simple enough that I can jump in and start editing RIGHT away! There’s entire Youtube channels dedicated to telling you how to use Resolve – and I started right away with the promo video for “The age of flight” (you can download it and experiment with it). If I was going to do a LOT of paid video work in Davinci Resolve, I’d invest in the whole two computer monitor – five external hard drive arrangement that the pros use. You can actually apparently buy hardware for Resolve – a panel and a custom keyboard with the shortcuts graphically encoded on them. Oddly enough, it seems to take about two steps more to do anything in Resolve than Filmora, but if you want professional results, you need to be using Premiere, Lightworks or Davinci Resolve. Resolve takes my prize for best professional video editor for 2019.
Conclusion. Most users are going to be getting the results they want from a simple video editor, and to me that’s the Filmora 9 program. But if you need to start doing intensive video editing work and have the computer to do it, Davinci Resolve is your ticket. If you want to get the full version (a few more features and has support for the expensive video panels), it’s only $299, which is a lot less than the add on panels!
