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What to folk use for video editing? I currently use Premier Elements on my PC and GoPro Quik on my iPhone and iPad, with source video and stills from GoPro, and digital cameras etc.  GoPro Quik seems ok if a bit clunky and limited when out and about.  I've got through the learning curve on Elements, it seems quite good and I don't see a reason to change.  GoPro Quik is nice that it seamlessly links with downloading GoPro footage from the camera  but it does seem rather cumbersome to use.  How do folk find iMovie for phone or iPad?  I guess the interface is limited compared to on an i book with a big screen?  One reason for the question is whether to commit to the learning curve for Quik, or start with iMovie or something else on my iPad.  Thanks

I moved away from the entire Adobe ecosystem and for video editing I used the free version of Davinci Resolve for years. There was no great need, but I went and bought the licence for it with version 15. Since then there have been free upgrades to version 20.

I bought a new camera that used the h.265 CODEC and the free version did not support h.265. I could have happily spent the rest of my years transcoding the h.265 footage to h.264 but it was taking too much time and in the end I took the plunge. Never regretted it for a single second.

There is a big learning curve with Davinci Resolve. This is because there are four different applications under the hood.

One for editing, another for effects, another for sound design and one for colour grading.

Very few people know how to use all four parts of Resolve. In fact I try to stay as far away from the effects part of the editing software as possible. I find it too complex.

For editing a project, it has all that you could ever need. And if you wanted to add a bit of polish to your audio and colour grading then you can spend a lifetime learning those crafts, or just enough to mix music with voice-overs.

As I said the free version does most things except for the AI bits and then you pay a one-off fee of £300.

I fell down the Rabbit Hole of colour grading, so much that earlier this year, I paid £500 for an online course on how to improve my skills. The majority of everything that you need to learn about Resolve is free on YouTube. You just have to work out who really knows their stuff and those that learned a trick yesterday, and then created a tutorial purporting to know all there is to know about that new trick.

I’ve recently stepped away from adobe Premier I really couldn’t justify the cost for the amount i used it (just keeping lightroom)

there is a free trial of Final cut pro (if you’re a mac user) 3 months free before committing to a one of £300

I will probably go with this after the three months, i did mess around with davinci but didn’t want to commit to much time to learning it as I was going to try the free Final Cut first.

really didn't like adobe subscriptions based model 🙁

Fortunately Premier Elements is the cut down one off  purchase version

I've been using Shotcut (note spelling) for the last couple of years.  It's free,  with a reasonably good interface and certainly good enough for my requirements. Colour grading is available but I rarely use it. I've had a few issues with changing text for titles / annotation etc once it's created but nothing that you can't work around. Plenty of online tutorials available on YouTube.

To be honest, I'd not even think of editing while I'm "out and about" but each to their own. I use Quik but only for controlling the GoPro remotely from my mobile never for editing, so can't comment on that front. 

+1 for Davinci Resolve. lt's insanely capable for a free app.

Even if you stuck to the editing part itself, there really isn't much of a learning curve. All non linear editors are roughly the same.

The learning curve is if you want special effects, studio quality audio or professional colour grading jedi skills.

Resolve is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. 

It's free and superior to any Adobe kit.

Da Vinci Resolve is your friend. The free version is insanely capable and enough for most people. 

The learning curve is no worse than any editing tool, and there’s a really good free video course on their website to pick it up. 

I’ve bought the studio version as I make extensive use of the AI upscale, and the hardware acceleration makes a big difference working with the 10-bit 4:2:2 h265 4k50 files I shoot on the main camera for my climbing videos. 

I was blown away with the Noise Reduction capabilities.

last month, and for the life of me I do not know why or how, the makers of Dehancer asked me to do a review of their plug-in in exchange for a fully working licence.

Davinci’s own Film Emulation is good, however Dehancer is incredibly powerful even for an armature such as me.

You really can emulate kodac 2383 film stock and mess about with split toning and the end result is not a pig’s ear.

If you gloss over the obvious white balance cockup that I did not spot before uploading, this turned out jolly well.

https://youtu.be/3iheGUYakww?si=CGcdJsFngWCKnIpa

Being a Linux user I use Kdenlive. It's also available Windows and Mac. It's free and does what I want, and is fairly easy to get the hang of.

My content comes from a variety of sources including GoPro, Drones and M43 cameras.

I believe it's quite powerful if you dig deep into it but I'm only scratching the surface.

Nice! 

My grading is limited to making both cameras more or less match, and keep the footage as realistic as possible, rather than applying any stylistic flourishes.

I'm sure some people on here are familiar with my videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3f7y3wdpcA&list=PLM3aYE8efXh8YxSfGBDFh...

That was cut together really well.

And from what I've discovered or learned trough trial and error is that matching cameras is really really hard. And if done well, like your climbing episode, gives a professional pazaz.

going from camera angle to camera angle did not take me out of the viewing experience one little bit with sudden colour and hue shifts.

Maybe you'd have done a better job on grit.

You'll be getting a drone soon.

This was my first ever attempt at filming with a drone and camera. I also experimented with a LUT for split toning. These were all experiments. I had to work out how to match the audio with the drone as well. One big learning curve.

youtube.com/watch?v=zsNLRfvWP9E&

I did have one for a while but sold it as it’s too anti-social to use at crags when other people are around, and it never got used. 

Definitely a whole new learning curve compared to photography.

Da Vinci Resolve is the clear and obvious choice in my opinion. The 'free' version is fully-featured unless you have requirements you're unlikely to have if you're not using it professionally. The editing hardware is also quite cheap if you do a lot of editing, and any of the hardware also comes with a Studio license included. Which, on that note, means that if you ever want a Studio license for it, it's significantly more cost-effective to buy the speed editor (mini consoles with a jog wheel and useful buttons) than it is to buy the software license.

The only reason I bought the Studio version was because my camera used the h.265 CODEC and the free version did not support it. Over time more and more cameras have started using h.265 because of their small file sizes and computers, phones and tablets have become powerful enough to deal with the demands to work with h.265.

If the OP only shoots in the older CODEC of h.264 then happy days. Resolve for the win.

However if most of the OP's cameras shoot h.265 then he may get frustrated converting the h.265 footage into something that Resolve will play with.

I never for a second regretted buying the full licence of Davinci Resolve because it made life so much more easy for me to use my cameras when filming at their highest quality.

The Studio licence unlocks an unbelievably amazing amount of new features that you never knew you needed until you hit a problem. My most recent problem was filming an interview, with wireless mics, which picked up some interference of electrical kit nearby making the audio unusable.

With one mouse click on the "Edit Page" Resolve cleaned up the audio instantly. Without this unlocked feature I would have had to throw the whole project in the bin, and look like an idiot to the people I'd just filmed.

The best feature I finally found a purpose for was editing an interview with just reading the transcribed conversation.

Resolve will listen to the interview, convert it to text and then allow you to edit the entire interview just by reading the conversation. Resolve will take out all the silent spaces, all the umm's and ahh's. It will even let you find specific parts of the conversation by searching for specific words.

The ability to clean up audio and edit from a transcription is worth the on-off fee for Davinci Resolve.

SPOILER.

Its a long time coming but because Resolve are continually adding newer and more powerful Artificial Intelligence tools into their software, they are going to start to charge a fee for future upgrades. Version 20 will most likely be the last free upgrade.

This isn't much to ask really as when the original version of Resolve came out, the colour grading bit only, the licence was £1,000,000.

The licence eventually dropped to £1,000. And when Blackmagic Design took over Resolve dropped to under £300 for many years giving free perpetual updates. Now that is loyalty to the customer.

Interesting. My GoPro13 uses codec 265. My Olympus OM-1 can do 264 or 265. My existing Adobe Premiere Elements (dumbed down one off purchase version) can work with 265.

Da Vinci Resolve (free version) can work with h265 and h264. 

The Studio version enables hardware decoding, which (if you have the right GPU), you get a very quick and responsive editing experience in the timeline view.

Using H265 on the free version means your CPU does the decoding, which while it does work, the interface is less responsive, and when loading the timeline you'll have to wait for a bit while the CPU decodes the source content and generates thumbnails etc. h265 is just very compute intensive to decode. I actually have a 2nd GPU (Intel Arc) to handle the h265 10-bit 4:2:2 in hardware as it's just that much nicer to work with.

Thanks for that. My laptop has an i7 2.4GHz processor and 16GB RAM. But U don’t mind waiting for it to do its thing

General note, but I wouldn't recommend editing anything that's encoded in h265 if you can help it - it's very poor for non-linear playback. Obviously you may not have a choice if that's the only encoding your camera supports, but I'd either transcode it prior to editing, or at the very least generate proxy media in a more friendly codec.

(Apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs)

I'm fairly sure I've dumped h265 footage into free Resolve (v18) in the past too with no dramas beyond the infuriation of trying to edit it natively.

Edit to add, midgen's explanation explains the last point. I'd personally just avoid working with it entirely. Its not just resource-intensive to decode; it also requires every frame since the last keyframe before the frame you want to be decoded. This makes it awful for any scenario where you need to scrub around the clip.

Generating proxy media is an easy fix for that and will also help when dealing with (now ubiquitous) high-resolution media.

No egg sucking here.

My computer is powerful enough to not even break a sweat with h.265 even when I'm on a 4k timeline. Scrubbing is a breeze. I use to film in ProRes thinking that I was using a superior codec. But that was until I learned that my camera can record h.265 4:2:2. It is, in my eyes, comparable to ProRes HQ at a fraction of the file sizes. I have no need to transcode or use proxies. And unless the project dictates, which I doubt as I'm an enthusiast publishing to YouTube, there is no need to use the older ProRes CODEC.

H.265 for the win.

I got different results saying footage off-line when using h.265.

With my computer, I do not have a single problem scrubbing. It may be six years old however it is more powerful than the Mac Mini 4 Pro when it comes to rendering projects.

I built my computer with video editing in mind as its sole purpose.

The 'what does and does not work with h265' is an absolute minefield. I agree that if you have hardware decoding in DVR Studio then it's fine (it's what I work with, I routinely have 100GB of source files from a shoot and my machine handles it fine).

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-de...

In my case I have an AMD 12-core CPU. An nVidia 4070 to do the AI work and encoding to AV1, and and Intel Arc A310 to do the decoding from h265 10/422.

I have an RTX 3090. Do you think I'd get much of an advantage if I upgraded to a 4070 or 4090?

When I look at the Task Manager the Graphic Card is constantly at 99% or 100% while my CPU and storage hardly goes beyond 4%.

4090 or 5090 would be the upgrade path, depends if you want to spend the money, they both offer improvements.

50-series has hardware h265 decoders (may not be an issue if you have an Intel CPU), but they aren't supported in Da Vinci Resolve yet, but should be when version 20 hits final release.

For enthusiasts h265 is fine - the file sizes are relatively small compared to all-i codecs, and as long as your computer can deal with the long GOP decoding you're golden.

That said, I work in broadcast television and we avoid it as much as possible as we shoot in super high bitrate (300 mbps plus) all-i codecs which is proxied for offline editing, then conformed for online and final post.

The offline is mainly Avid (eeew) with a little bit of Premiere (note the e at the end guys ) but the conform and grade are all Resolve.  Engineers loooove resolve as it's a much better product than Premiere or Avid, but there are few professional editors who have switched to it as their NLE of choice.  However, Blackmagic are pushing it hard right now and lots of colleges and universities are buying it, along with Blackmagic cameras etc as the cost is a fraction of the alternatives.

With Blackmagic pushing it this hard I'd expect a whole new generation of filmmakers to come through who have learnt their craft on their kit so I'd imagine they will become much more prevalent in years to come.

Perhaps not with their cameras though.  They're cheap, but have their drawbacks and current DOPs tend to use the bigger names (Sony, Canon, Arri, etc) so the DOPS of the future will get to grips with them when they learn on the job in camera assist roles.

TL : DR Resolve is great, and now is probably a good time to get on board with it

I may go for a 4090 for two reasons.

The first is its cheaper than a 5090. And the second is that I've just bought a new PSU and it won't cope with the 5090. A few of them have caught fire so far.

I have an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x CPU running it all. Over Christmas I treated my self to the most powerful CPU that my computer could take but I was plagued with problems. The firsrt was the PSU was too old and need ed replacing but the second and more insidious was that the Nvideo Graphic Drivers released after Christmas Eve were killing computers all over the world.

Well after the chat I downloaded Resolve, which asked me to upgrade my Nvideo driver on my laptop. I’m not risking that so happy to stay with Premiere Elements

You don't have to upgrade any drivers. I'm still using drivers from last year.

Premier Elements is a good bit of kit. I used it when I started out experimenting with video editing software.

nVidia drivers are pretty good. Use the studio (stable) version. No need to be avoiding updates for their GPUs.