I’ve started recording gameplay footage of a Fallout 4 playthrough as sort of a video diary of my character’s evolution. While I could just store the raw footage somewhere, I’d like to clean it up some. Remove the boring bits (minigames and inventory management, for example), add some basic titles and transitions and finally, compress the hell out of it, hopefully without losing too much quality. If I like the end result, maybe even upload the result to Youtube, but that’s a big if.
So what video editor would be best suited to this endeavor? I’ve been tinkering with iMovie and Davinci Resolve, and successfully edited and cleaned up some footage. Then, today I saw this deal and snapped it up for $25:
So now I have iMovie, Davinci and Vegas Pro/Movie Studio to play with. But I’m not sure which to move forward with. Of course there’s the question of which is most appropriate to my hardware (see bottom) and purpose, but I also want to consider the possibility of learning more advanced video editing. Any thoughts?
I also have a Mac laptop that can run iMovie and Davinci Resolve fairly well, but the Ryzen stomps it for encoding. But I can’t run iMovie or FCP on an AMD CPU.
You don’t need much more than the venerable Windows Movie maker. Maybe not the best idea to attempt to get a copy of that now abandoned software but my point still stands. Watch out for overly complicated software. If it’s too tricky to pick up then that will get in the way of you getting stuff done. Being the most feature complete program increases the complexity to the point where a novice can’t get anything done. So the concept of “best” all depends on you the user.
I used to use OpenShot a lot but it’s been a while since I have used it. I have also used Vegas.
OpenShot is open-source and free. Runs on Linux and Windows. It’s brain dead simple and is more than capable enough to put together a nice video. We are talking home video type of thing rather than Hollywood quality movie.
Since I am only familiar with Vegas, I will only say, Vegas uses CPU and CPU alone. Everything your CPU have, VEGAS can use. It doesn’t use the GPU much though. There are built in effects and transitions and stuff, that are GPU accelerated, but still, even using those the GPU stays pretty idle.
Your 1700 will be able to render 1080p video in real time (30 minute video will be done in about 30 minutes)…
If you have Mac - try FinalCut or whatever the apple software was… It’s blazing fast even on slow hardware…
Been using resolve studio for years, it’s my preferred suite.
Vegas locks you into windows, so if you ever have to collab with people on OSX (or linux, god forbid) it’s less ideal.
IIRC vegas also doesn’t support OFX plugins or have a built in fully featured compositor.
Resolve is great, and Resolve studio is more than enough for 90% of projects even in production environments. I’d recommend that over the magix/sony stuff or new fcp
@psycho_666 I haven’t specifically tried rendering 1080p video in Resolve, but I did manage to render 1080p down to 720p (with a few very minor transitions) at about 3x real-time. A 45 minute long video was done in about 15 minutes in Resolve, IIRC. I may have to re-open the project to be sure.
Resolve in Linux is nice in theory, but getting it to actually work is a PITA. I was only able to get it working by installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on another drive, then installing AMDGPU-PRO. That did indeed work, but severely gimped Linux’s gaming performance, and I couldn’t get WINE/Proton working at all with the pro driver. And Resolve’s codec support under Linux is severely limited (Resolve Studio is supposed to be better about this.) If I want to edit video on my rig, AND get GPU acceleration, it looks like I’ll need to stick with Windows or have a whole partition dedicated to Ubuntu/AMDGPU-PRO.
I’m still kind of conflicted about whether to start editing with a pro tool, or begin with a noob’s toolkit like iMovie, Movie Studio or OpenShot. @PendragonUK makes a good point about too many options being confusing and overwhelming for a tyro.