What Software are You Using?

I am using Pinnacle 14. I bought the ultimate Premium Package.

My camera is a Canon 7D which uses a CF card. I transfer the video, after numbering, to video folders on an external HD. That means that I am not using Capture features of any software but importing from the folders. It helps to make a folder for each project and have all your media in the one folder.

It took me ages to find software that supports the 7D video format and that would run video on my machine without stuttering and/or not showing it at all. It even took me ages to find out that 7D video is a Mpeg 4 version of Mov. The simplest things seem to be the most difficult to find out!

I found a Top 10 Comparison on-line but apparently ii is a couple of years out of date. Unfortunately, I didn't find that out until this week and wasted alot of time trying some programs because of it.

Pinnacle has forums and some of my questions have already been asked.

Pinnacle has lots of videos to help you find your way around and even though, it has a PDF Manual on line, its not the same, for me, as having one in my hand. Much easier to have a manual you can look at while trying something than having to switch back and forth from the on-line version. I know, I could print some of it but with there being un-numbered pages in the PDF I'm not sure how to print just the pages I need.

By the way, Adobe Premiere Elements 8 has no PDF manual and very few help videos. I tried using PE8 but it doesn't support MOV/Mpeg4. You can transcode to another format but every time you do that your video is somewhat degraded as some formats compress it.

From what I understand Sony Vegas supports the format but when I had a trial version I was unable to do some things I was hoping to accomplish so let the trial lapse and wasn't able to download a new trial.

Even the language is all new and sometimes I have no idea what people are talking about in the video forums.

The editing isn't an intuitive thing for me and just finding the right buttons to use has been a struggle. In a couple more days I may even have a bit of video to show!

Another thing is that I wear trifocals and have a difficult time using the Live View screen on the 7D for focusing. I have to focus using the eyepiece and then go to Live View.

I would love to hear what software, etc. other people are using and how you are overcoming some of your problems.

Hi Eleanor,

I can sympathize with your entry into video editing. It is a whole new world filled with terminology and acronyms that few fully understand.

I am a Apple Mac user and have tried both Final Cut Pro as well as iMovie to produce short videos. Both are problematic for the beginner. iMovie is far simpler and meets most of my needs. Final Cut Pro 7 is expensive as compared with iMovie ($999 versus $79) -- but there is nothing better on the market today than Final Cut Pro 7 in my opinion.

I have no idea what software to use with Windows machines, perhaps others can assist you here.

The good part is that regardless of what software you use, if you continue to work at it, sooner or later it will start to make sense. Yes, it is completely frustrating when first getting started, very much so. Add to that the need to edit audio and marry the video with the audio is a whole other issue. Audio is also difficult to understand, the terms are totally new to the uninitiated.

I am hoping to get into video in a big way during the coming months, it is something I have wanted to do for a very long time, and now that the tools are falling into place at reasonable costs it all seems possible. What I must force myself to do is to plan the video, that means doing a story board, listing the shots I need in detail, then shooting. Then the tough part, the editing.

I would bet in a very short period of time we will see a whole new crop of shooters here who will be able to assist us with questions like those you have posed. The whole video world is exploding with talent, I see more of it each day. Let us hope that the gurus will lend a hand at educating us about techniques, software, and evaluations of this or that equipment.

Good luck in your quest. Stay at it.

Best regards,

Bill

Eleanor - not a lot of info out there yet as this whole dslr video thing is pretty new to most people. Exactly why we created this forum so we can get a jump on it - and we are activly seeking talent to help out so hopefully we'll see some pretty good growth here in the coming year as more and more people get into it.

Like Bill, I too have a Mac. I have only used imovie so far and actually haven't even created anything worth posting yet! I have not heard good things about adobe elements premiere - and Final Cut Pro is pretty expensive. I too would be interested in knowing what other options windows users have.

Looking forward to soaking up new videos and lots on info in this forum

I used iMovie for the gray tree frog post. Final Cut has an express version that is far cheap than the pro version.
For Mac users there seems to be an advantage because of these listed programs. Final Cut Pro is an industry standard and used widely in the industry. It is a bear to learn!

I use both iMovie for short simple projects, but the bulk of my work is using Final Cut Pro. There is a significant learning curve, but once you get over it, it is a very powerful tool.

This is just like when folks were entering digital photography and were intimidated by Photoshop. However the advantage that we have as photographers is that video has been around for quite some time and the tools are very mature and sophisticated. There is a wealth of knowledge online and in books on video editing so this is nothing new, what is new to us is the workflow, but we have a leg up on most folks as we are already familiar with a digital workflow, for stills.

If you want a hint on making your life easier when editing video from the latest DSLRs check out this short article I wrote a while ago on my blog: http://wildnaturephoto.com/2009/05/01/e ... kii-video/

I will be making a series of short screencasts for photogs entering this space, be on the lookout for them soon.

-J

I understand that the stutter you often get is basically the norm with Windows and not present for MAC users. I use wiindows and it is very annoying. The only thing I found that is somewhat helpful is to reduce the screen size when viewing the raw file (mov).

I use Sony Vegas and it was difficult to learn the basics. I hope to move to Adobe After Affects at some point as it is a much more useful program to edit with.

One tip I can pass on to Canon 5d2 and 7d users is to set up a picture style in camera and use it for the movie mode. I use one with high contrast, saturation, and sharpness, and it gives an excellent image quality before editing.

Lots of different issues and comments here...

The first thing I'd like to note about the 7D (or a lot of the other DSLRs out there) is that they record in a codec called H.264. This is NOT a format that is well-suited for editing. This means that one of the first things you need to do is "transcode" your camera footage into a file format that your editing suite prefers. For Final Cut users this typically means ProRes. XDCAM also works pretty well. Some software, like iMovie (and I think Final Cut Express) will automatically transcode imported footage into an editing format called AIC. (I wish I knew more about the Windows platform to make suggestions there.) The bottom line is that the workflow for video is complicated and annoying compared to cranking RAW images out of a camera.

Harold's approach to picture settings is precisely opposite of what I use. I have low contrast, depressed saturation, and somewhat lowered sharpness. I do this because I want to maximize the amount of information I encode into the video files and will use my video editing tools to create the final look ("grading" as it is known) -- much akin to taking a RAW file and processing it with Lightroom or Aperture (although, unfortunately the source files are not raw images...)

- dave

In my Banff & MN video I posted here I used Windows Live Movie Maker. I've used a little bit of Adobe Premiere and will be using some Final Cut in the future. But for just starting out, it can't get much easier than Windows Live Movie Maker. Plus its a free download. It's obviously fairly limiting but I was able to produce some decent quality stuff in very little time.

I'm using Sony Vegas Pro. Easy to use and very powerful!

I'm trying to avoid buying an expensive program until I find one of the less expensive versions I like. I would really like one that has the same type of "effects" and their controls as PS. I am used to sliders for things like Sharpening and Blur so it makes sense to me to find a program where the learning curve isn't so great. I like the curves and levels boxes for PS. Are there any programs that use those?

I think you can do that type of stuff in PS and use something else for the editing

I used Pro Show Gold for the PC. It is slide show software and quite easy to use yet robust if need be. I'm sure you could have more control over the editing with Final Cut Pro but having sat in on commercial video editing sessions I think it is akin to learning Photoshop for the first time.

You can find a link for the PE 8 help manual (pdf) here http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PremiereEle ... 8_help.pdf

I'm using iMovie 8 (part of the iLife '08 suite) on an Apple PowerMac G5. It's simple, easy to use, and quick.

Just started using Final Cut Express 4, which falls somewhere in between iMove and Final Cut Pro in terms of features.