My Video Editor Debacle

Tony

Staff member
I had posted in the off topic thread about my issues I'm having with my editor. Well, maybe not the issues I'm having, but that I needed a new video editor for our videos. And let me tell ya, it's a long time overdue.

When I first started in making videos for all of you, I started with what everyone started with, WMM or Windows Movie Maker. And back in the day, it was a solid editor as long as you didn't want any fancy features. But I quickly grew out of WMM and had to move to a new editor. I chose Pinnacle and for a while, it was great. But after some updates and such to the editor and windows, nothing but constant crashes. So I moved to Cyberlink PowerDirector 14, which I'm still using up to today.

Power director has a little quirk. If you find your settings and you save them, it is perfect. I can edit a video in no time and the results are great. But, and this is the quirk, if you don't get the settings perfect, you can edit fast, you can render fast, but it shows in the final product. I had this issue two weeks ago and again today. The difference today is I just reinstalled my OS so I don't have my settings. But that doesn't matter because the perfect settings that you need depends on how the galaxy's are aligned, if the moon is full and if a whale is peeing on a dolphins head at that exact time. If all of those things don't line up, you get absolute crap render quality!!!

So I put out a little feeler asking if anyone had Premier Pro for sale, a legit copy. Screw that "cracked" crap, that is a good way to get a free ride in a police car. I want legit. But, I don't want to do or spend what Adobe wants me to spend or do. They have went completely to the cloud for their programs which I HATE. And, you now do not buy the software, you rent it like it's a friggin apartment. One year of one program is $250. How Bout NO! So I am looking for a second hand copy of a PHYSICAL PROGRAM that I install on my computer.

I highly doubt anyone has one so thanks to Randy (rdsok), I started looking at other options. I am on the first one right now.

HitFilm Express

This is the first program that I'm trying out. Most of the features that I need are there. The only thing that is missing and you have to pay $14 for is noise reduction, but I"m not paying that money because they do give you a small test, and it didn't remove the noise I was hearing. This is completely free as long as you post to your facebook or twitter page. But, you can post to facebook with a private post so no one else can see it. You MUST do this otherwise you can't download the software. From there, they send you an email, you click on a link and it takes you right back to the site where they could have just done a transfer.

So in using HFE, I'm noticing some things that bug me. First, if you are going to edit the timeline, you must first click on the timeline even though the scrubber is already there. You have to scrub to the part you want to split (for example), then you have to click on the video or audio (they are linked most of the time) and then you have to hit alt+del if you want the gap to close. If you move the timeline, playback stops, if you touch the scrubber, playback stops, if you adjust how wide the timeline is, playback stops, if you take a drink of coffee, playback stops. You want to talk about highly annoying!!!

Fine, I pushed through that aggravation and moved onto another one, the layout. The timeline was very small in only 1/4 of the screen. I wanted that all the way across the screen so that I could see more and move less. Remember, you move it, playback stops. It took me 10 minutes of moving pieces around in the perfect order to put the playback image in the top right, my options in the top left and the timeline along the bottom. If you are not perfect in how you select this stuff, you are screwed and have to start all over again... ugh...

That is done, video is done being edited, it's time to render. I'm going to chalk this one up to a learning curve because I have saved my options of 1080p/60fps and I hit render or export and started watching my CPU. It sat at 0%. I waited over a minute before it started doing something. And now, even though it has been going for over 30 minutes, it has not used more than 60% of my CPU. My fans on my radiator have not ramped up at all.

The video that I'm rendering right now is the Carb Rebuild Video for the T-Maxx 2.5 project. It is only 15 minutes long (I say only because most other videos in this series are stupid long lol). But it is going to take over 40 minutes to render this video. With powerdirector and all of that crap lining up perfectly, it would spit out a completed video in 15 minutes max. If it was long with a lot of special effects or something, I could get it up to an hour, but that is for a long video with a lot of speed changes, transitions and so on. I have hardly any of that in this video. I did fade transitions also knows as crossfades.

This has me wondering if it is because I'm doing this at 60fps. My camera only shoots in 30fps, but I have been making some great looking videos with movement on every frame by upscaling my videos to 60. I will try another render when this is done with the framerate set to "From Source", which is the video files which are 30fps. I guess I will find out here in a second....

Okay, it finally finished rendering and this is stupid. In almost all other video editors, you edit your clips and it ONLY RENDERS YOUR CLIPS!!! not the 30 minutes of crap after your clips which is just blank space. No, you have to go in and set it to your in point (video start) and your out point (video end), but now, since I'm having to render this video AGAIN (more in a minute) I set the timeline to the exact amount of time that the video is long. This is just stupid!!!

So why am I having to render out the whole video again? Because even though the audio was perfect and exactly as I had it, it sped up the video and it was done half way through the video. Let me repeat, the VIDEO was done half way through while the AUDIO was still going..... It completely screwed up the video.

I'm going to chalk this up to a "growing pain" or a "learning curve" but if after setting the IN and OUT AND timeline length on the project settings it screws up again, this one will be deleted from my computer and I'm going to be up all night so that you guys get a video tomorrow by fighting with PowerDirector or if I have to, installing Pinnacle back on the computer and doing it with that. I'm trying everything I can do to keep from spending $250 on a rental.... But, it may all soon come to an end anyway and all of this may be for nothing in the grand scheme of things....
 

Tony

Staff member
Oh, I forgot to note, when you push the button to open the program, it takes 30 seconds for it to open. CPU and memory stay bottomed out, it is not even trying to load. It's like there is a 30 second timer on the program. I think this will be the one and only video that I will edit with this software...
 

murankar

Staff member
If your looking for video editors the only one I can think Of that's anything near professional is sony Vegas. I have a newer version of pinnical and I didn't have any issues, then again I don't live on an editor.

Now I am using open source kdenlive. It is known to crash but its fairly solid and compares to sony Vegas.
 

Tony

Staff member
Finally got a descent render out of HitFilm Express. I had to render out at 30fps. Audio would scale to the 60fps, but video would play twice as fast. The issue I'm seeing now is absolutely HORRIBLE tearing in the rendered video. I'm going to go ahead and upload what I have now but I think I'm going to play with Blender. It is a very powerful 3D modeling software, but it also has a video editor built in. If I can put two programs I use into one (powerdirector and fusion360 is what I used before), then I'm all about it. So there will be an update on my experiences with Blender as a video editor. I know it's going to take a very long time to learn all of this.
 

Tony

Staff member
Holy crap, I just opened up the SD card from my camera to load the final clips from the T-Maxx build onto my computer (the last clips I have shot as of right now) and I have about 2.5 hours of video that I need to edit... My brain hurts just thinking about trying to wrap my head around editing 2.5 hours of video on a new platform... Damn you CyberLink!!!!!!
 

murankar

Staff member
I personally would not use blender as my main editor. It was meant to render 3D projects into video and then imported into a real video editor.

When you render a 3D project it renders it into frames. That could potentially be 60 JPGs a per second. So blender foundation made it so that one could convert the frames into a video with basic video processing.
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
The software I couldn't remember the name of is DaVinci Resolve... of course I can't vouch for it since I don't do video but I've heard a lot of good reports from others
 

Tony

Staff member
Just tried Shotcut, yea NO. You zoom in on a timeline, it freezes, you try to move a clip, it freezes. Rinse and repeat for every other thing that you do when editing a video.... That was fast. And my CPU and RAM were no where near maxed out!
 

Tony

Staff member
Just downloaded DiVinci and the hoops you have to jump through are a little harsh just to download the software. But, if they put as much time into their editor that they did on their website and physical items you can purchase (after selling your house, cars and first born), then this should be a pretty good editor. I have already mapped quite a few of my buttons to the program and have done some testing. Unfortunately it's getting a little late and it's time to hit the sack. I will pick back up on this tomorrow. If it edits easily and renders nicely, this may just be the shiznit that I have been looking for. Thanks Randy!
 

Tony

Staff member
Very interesting. I'm going to see how DaVinci does since it has so many features but yet the basics are incredibly easy to use. The 3D rendering that it can do is absolutely awesome and I may just have to make some "more elaborate" videos with it lol.
 

Tony

Staff member
Man, 0545 came early this morning. But I fired up DaVinci Resolve and started editing what I think is going to be the longest video in the T-Maxx series, the Reassembly. I have edited about 4:30 of the video, and so far, it is quite smooth. There are some quirks though. Right after you edit a clip and you play it back to make sure you cut it where you wanted to, the audio is very scratchy. But give it a little bit to render, and it smooths right out.

I'm going to pretty much stick with this one for a while since it is just smooth flowing, not overly complicated, not clunky, it just works. Once I'm comfortable with the editing part, then I will start playing with the other features this thing has like Fusion... Oh yea, that is a whole other level that I have yet to touch with anything, and it's FREE!!! I was ready to pay $200+ for something like this....
 

Tony

Staff member
Just finished editing the longest video in the New T-Maxx Series, and yes, it is longer than the shock rebuild video. So now I'm putting DaVinci to the test to see how it does. With PowerDirector I could NOT put my logo in the lower left because it would screw up the render. I put it in this one. Although I found out there is a 1 hour limit on static images. I had to put it in there twice lmao.

But, it is only using 15% of my GPU to render this, I figured it would use more. My CPU is at 90%. Seems there is some misconfiguration somewhere.
 

Tony

Staff member
I'm getting some really bad tearing in my videos. Going to try to solve this issue by going from 60i to 30p. I'm thinking the "i" is out of sync.
 

Tony

Staff member
Doing some more work in DaVinci Resolve 15 (I know 16 is out, but not ready to upgrade just yet). Since my camera is giving me so many issues with video quality, I decided to try to 'adjust' some settings, and quite honestly, I think I made things worse. Ah well, it's a simple video that I'm uploading, or might be uploading, so I'm just going to roll with it and see what people say. I am taking a break from the T-Maxx for a while though. We are going to stick with a Monday upload schedule but we are going to mix things up each week so the content is not stagnant like it has been. This Monday is the last T-Maxx video for a while and from there, we will see how things go.
 

Tony

Staff member
Yea, I wanted to do a run of T-Maxx only to see what everyone though. The few that watched them liked them, but quite honestly, most people don't like it and I'm bored just doing one thing at a time. So time to change it up again.
 

Tony

Staff member
It turns out that DaVinci is the cause of the tearing in the videos, not the camera. The camera just makes things blurry... I can't win for losing with this stuff....
 

Tony

Staff member
So I found out what I need to do. I need to apply deinterlacing to the clips.... Guess what... On a free editing software, that little feature is going to cost me $300.... 2.5 hours of sleep, I knew something like this would happen today....
 
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