Recommendations for video editing

[Dave2002]

I have been testing out various ways of editing video material. There are many issues.

Currently I have Adobe Premiere Elements 14 and ToastDVD on an iMac. I have several editors for PCs, such as various versions of Movie Plus, but I hardly have a working PC now, and am not terribly inclined to develop along that route.

There are also some video editors which work with the iOS - that is a possibility.

One issue is whether the editors can cut and trim sections of video without loss of quality - or significant loss. Almost all video material is encoded in lossy formats, but for standards such as MPEG2 it should be possible to have tools which can at least trim and cut without quality loss, by ensuring that cuts are done on or close to base frames. MPEG4 may be similar.

It's not clear that all video editors do this.

Other types of edit operations will almost inevitably involve some operations to generate new or intermediate frames, which then have to be re-encoded back into the preferred lossy format, such as MPEG2 or MPEG4. Such operations might include post production Zooming and Panning.

Having already discovered some of the basic issues, I now want to cut a video into much shorter sections which hopefully will make editing of the whole much faster and simpler.

Does anyone have any tools which they recommend, or tips for this process? I am particularly interested in tools for Mac OS X, but if there are tools which work well on other platforms (Windows, Linux) I'd at least like to know of them.

Are there any worthy iOS apps, or are most of them curiosities to be avoided, or only suitable for YouTube or other possible low quality applications? Some iOS apps are rather good - but not all, and I don't know which might be worth checking for iOS.

[johnb]

I know nothing about iOS but "VideoReDo TV Suite" is reputed to be the "gold standard" for video editing on a PC and I can certainly recommend it having used it for many years.

Just thought I would mention it in case other people might be interested in getting a PC recommendation

[Dave2002]

johnb

Thanks. Would it work even on a laptop type PC, or does it really need a high performance computer?
Does it even work on Win XP? We do have a few machines which currently run XP, though we are proposing to phase them out or scrap them. On another thread some while back I did ask about PC type laptops - whether they would be worth buying or not. Partly that is to save space - we really don't want space taken up by tower units or additional displays if we can avoid that.

My current experiences - over the last few months - suggest that video is really tricky and time consuming. If a new PC could do video editing - say even a laptop reasonably effectively - then such might be worth considering.

Otherwise I'd probably prefer to stay with the Macs, perhaps even using Bootcamp with (say) Windows 10 to run Windows applications.

My feeling though is that there could be significant differences between different software, for example speed of operation, or ease of use, even independent of the hardware platform.

[MrGongGong]

You have Premiere Elements which should do what you need IMV
If you want to go the whole hog then Final Cut Pro is what many folks use BUT the new version seems to be hated and many folks have gone back to Adobe.

[johnb]

Dave,

Yes, it will work on a laptop but the best thing to do is download the trial version and test it out. From memory, it is a 30 day trial with full functionality.

There is a lot more to VideoReDo than the straightforward topping, tailing and cutting out adverts but that type of editing (at frame level) very simple and quick to do. Also the software only re-encodes the frames affected by the edits you make - the rest of the frames are "fast copied". VideoReDo is also very good at maintaining lipsync across edits.

There is one thing I wish they would add - the ability to fade out the audio. (You can adjust the audio sync, the audio level, etc but can't fade the audio.

Let me know how you get on if you decide to try it out.

[Stunsworth]

I know nothing about iOS but "VideoReDo TV Suite" is reputed to be the "gold standard" for video editing on a PC and I can certainly recommend it having used it for many years.

Just thought I would mention it in case other people might be interested in getting a PC recommendation

Just about the only piece of PC software I've missed since switching to Mac. It's far, far faster at trimming video than anything else I've used.