Garrett Williamson Posted August 23, 2013 Share Posted August 23, 2013 hehehe I love those student discounts cuz I can still get them you 28 year old losers hur hur hur hur Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 Thanks guys. I don't think I should get Sony Vegas because the cheapest version is $400. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rexy Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I've used Magix Movie Edit Pro for years and while it does have its moments, it's inexpensive (latest version costs £40, or £80 if you want the premium) and has enough functionability for me to get by. I've done all of my Youtube videos with that one, including my project perspectives. Works great on Windows too Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I use Vegas like Jose said, I don't have hitfilm yet tho... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 Thanks, everyone. For now I went ahead and downloaded the outdated Premiere Pro 2 since it's free. This first video cannot be saved. It has been exported and is of high quality but SOME small details that I could see in the in-editor preview are not the same after exporting. I've tried a variety of formats and options to see if I can make it look exactly like the preview but nothing has worked. So I'm going to go ahead and release this one and then try Premiere (which means I'll have to learn this crap ALL OVER AGAIN) for the next one. I'll let you know how it goes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brandon Strader Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Make sure you download the free H.264 codecs so you can make good looking videos with smaller file sizes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chernabogue Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I used Vegas for years, and for basic/medium VFX, there's no need for After Effects or other softwares, as Vegas can handle them pretty nicely. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 Thanks, Brandon. That is very useful advice. Your avatar has gotten cuter lately. So all you guys who use Vegas shelled out like 500 bucks!? You are all very impressive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 *SIGH* I think Premiere 2.0 is way too old to do ANYTHING anymore. All I wanted to do was import some video into it. It doesn't seem to support flv and when I tried to upload a different file type, it just stayed at 0% and never increased. Should have known there would be no free solution. I wanted to add just ONE more picture to the end of my video in Videopad Editor, did that, it crashed, and now every time I open the project, it crashes immediately after it loads 100% of the time. THIS IS MY LIFE EVERY TIME I EVER DO ANYTHING WITH A COMPUTER!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 OK. I have decided. VideoStudio Pro X6 is a good one for me, I think. It's got a reputation of being easy to use, which is kind of important to me, and I was really happy to read a couple reviews that said it has never crashed once. THAT is what I need. I'm downloading a trial right now. I'm going to attempt to abuse it a bit and see what happens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José the Bronx Rican Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 So all you guys who use Vegas shelled out like 500 bucks!? You are all very impressive. I found an extremely good deal years ago at B&H on a boxed bundle of Vegas 5 and Sound Forge 8 for about that much. I couldn't pass it up. Went broke for a while after that purchase, but it was worth it. Been using ever since. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett Williamson Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 So all you guys who use Vegas shelled out like 500 bucks!? You are all very impressive. Vegas is only $500? Gee, I might need to look into this... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sole Signal Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Not to pile on, but I've also used Vegas for about five years. Easy to use, UI feels very natural. They do make an entry level version for about $100 though I've never used it. Feature list looks pretty strong. http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Movie-Studio-Platinum-Suite/dp/B008MIMIY8/ref=pd_cp_sw_0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 Since we're somewhat favoring Vegas here, I'll chime in and say I've apparently used it for almost five years. The UI is very friendly, and I seem to recall I got used to it in half a day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Coop Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 only $500? These are two words I don't believe I've put side by side... ever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irriadin Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I paid $450 for Adobe Production Premium Student edition (which gets you Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, and others). That's normally $2000, I think. For motion design, there's really no substitute for what you can get in After Effects for the price. The camera and motion available to you are leagues better than what you get in Vegas. Vegas IS great for standard non-linear editing, but once you start using After Effects extensively, Premiere starts becoming more and more the better option. Plus, the preview accelerator in Premiere is absolutely phenomenal when you pair it up with a video card with a lot of CUDA cores. I have a GTX 680 and my premiere previews are super smooth and incredibly quick. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rapidkirby3k Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 (edited) For me, I use Sony Vegas. Edited August 24, 2013 by Rapidkirby3k Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett Williamson Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 These are two words I don't believe I've put side by side... ever. well I mean when you think about really nice professional film editing softwares, normally the price range is somewhere around $800 and $1000. $500 isn't like a tiny amount of money; it's just not as much as I would think for a software like that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Coop Posted August 24, 2013 Share Posted August 24, 2013 I know people keep mentioning that they got this or that with a student discount. I feel I should mention, that the so-called Student/Education/Academnic editions of those software packages aren't supposed to be used for profit. Unless the licensing setup has changed in recent years, that stipulation is part of why students get such a big discount. That means if you want to use that software for profit/business, you gotta pay the full price to get a full license. Maybe it's changed with Adobe, but that's how it was when I got student discounts on software during college. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 24, 2013 Author Share Posted August 24, 2013 I'm trying the trial version of Corel 6X right now. So far it seems to be working fine. It hasn't crashed yet but it's not easy to use as Videopad editor. I'm getting used to it, though. It can do a lot more than Videopad so in the end, I'd like to think that this program could be the one. I'm pretty sure this trial version is the same as the full version just with a thirty-day time limit. On a separate note, I exported my Videopad video as a very high quality avi file that took about 10 minutes to render so that I could keep everything as beautiful as possible but when I went to upload that to YouTube, it said it would take 180 minutes! Any recommendations on file size? Thanks for all your help everyone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted August 25, 2013 Share Posted August 25, 2013 (edited) On a separate note, I exported my Videopad video as a very high quality avi file that took about 10 minutes to render so that I could keep everything as beautiful as possible but when I went to upload that to YouTube, it said it would take 180 minutes! Any recommendations on file size? Thanks for all your help everyone. Woah, don't render as AVI and then just use it like that. That's gonna turn out huge compared to other extensions. Other extensions might be 3 times smaller or even smaller than that. Something you could do to alleviate the ridiculous file size (if you happen to have AVI files on hand) is googling VirtualDub. It's essentially an AVI file processor. If you open an AVI in there, set it to a codec that should turn out smaller (like Microsoft Video 1, or a favorite of your choice), chop the video length if you need to, etc. It's actually pretty easy to get used to. Then just re-save it (in a different folder) as a new AVI (you might have to actually type in ".avi" without the quotes or it might accidentally save as a "File"), then if you want you could just replace the old file if you like the new product. As a result, it should turn out even smaller when it's rendered as a smaller filetype than if you didn't process the AVI in VirtualDub. Try out some of the smaller extensions like M2T, MP4, MP2, WMV, MOV, etc. For some reason or another, even though YouTube doesn't explicitly state it accepts M2T or MP2, I've uploaded M2T in the past (a year ago) without any problems. Who knows, it might have changed. You could try it anyway with no drawback. Extensions like that are going to render and upload faster, and from what I've done, the quality is reduced by a negligible amount. Something I do sometimes is sharpen the whole video a little bit via video FX (maybe 10~20%) to compensate for the pixel quality reduction. Try to keep it, say, under 400MB for 2 minutes if you can. It really depends on the video content. For example, an HD WMV file could be around 100~200MB or so at 2 minutes' length. YouTube accepts, IIRC, 100GB or less, but smaller is much more convenient IMO. It's not like you really need to upload a 30+ minute video many times... right? That aside, around 2 months ago I decided I'd keep my audio quality up to par, so if possible and if that matters to you, it'd be a good idea for you to create a rendering template where the encoding is very high. 24-bit 48 kHz should be sufficient, although I actually overdo it on purpose and do 24-bit 96kHz. So far, I've tried watching my own videos in 720p and comparing that to 144p, and there's literally no perceivable difference in audio quality to me, even after YouTube's audio compression algorithm. I used to hear a huge difference before I changed up my encoding options, and many people would expect that to be the case too, with such a drastic resolution difference. Now, I don't, so I'm happy. You could also check this article out for more info on encoding for YouTube. Edited August 25, 2013 by timaeus222 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Legendary Zoltan Posted August 26, 2013 Author Share Posted August 26, 2013 Thanks, Timaeus. Corel 6X makes the export options very simple. I JUST FINISHED MY VIDEO! I exported it as a WMV and it looks perfect. Check it out, everyone! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmdOlQGMYZM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 (edited) Nice! I usually don't like rap, but I liked that. Something you could try for next time is VirtualDub's "nearest neighbor" resizing filter (available in the "Filters" dropdown option). What that does is resize a video, making it look like it stretched the size of individual pixels, and that ultimately gives you clearer video quality than any typical resizing job. If you try that and resize to 640x480, or 1280x960, or something near the size that you think is good enough for the quality you want, it should give better quality than simply inserting the clips you already have into Corel 6X and rendering it as-it-was. It wouldn't take more than 10 minutes of your time per video, including the rendering from VirtualDub (not to mention you don't have to watch it render). The setting up should take less than 3 minutes if you wanted to try it. This is something I started doing recently ( an example), and an example of how a similar video of mine looked before I did it (that remix is soooo old). Notice how on the first one, you can actually see every single pixel past 0:18, and on the second one, it's more blurry, so there's that difference for you to decide between. Edited August 26, 2013 by timaeus222 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José the Bronx Rican Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 Using "Nearest Neighbor" to scale things any higher than double-sized is a bit of overkill IMO. I believe in some softening of your average video game image: if you were originally at 224px vertical, 448px vertical should be good enough even for HD, but then I believe 1080p for an HD video featuring this kind of footage would also be overkill. Pixels were never meant to be blown that large. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan Jobson Posted August 26, 2013 Share Posted August 26, 2013 Screenflow. Although I'd love to pick up Adobe After Effects to make my music videos look a little nicer. <3 particle effects Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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