Video editing

[Walter White]

I'm sort of dabbling in the video editing world and don't know much about it, and I have a feeling some people on this site do. I guess I appreciate any advice or help on questions I have if you could. I'm thinking about doing some comedy sketches in the future and putting them on youtube, mostly just for fun. I just got hit with how amazing editing is and the endless possibilities. Anyway, this is where I'm at right now:

I have sort of a funny clip from a video game and I had something specific with it in mind editing wise. So I imported the clip from my ps4 which is a .mp4 format. I have windows vista and it wouldn't play in windows movie maker (crappy version). So I figured out I needed to convert it to a different format, which I did. So the clip played fine. And I did all the editing I wanted to do and it looks fine straight off my laptop.

But the problem is windows movie maker sucks and sometimes it blanks out half the clip for no reason. Sometimes it works normal when you play it, sometimes it blacks out half of it. So hoping that wouldn't be a problem, I tried to upload it to youtube but no go. The black out part still stayed on the clip. And to top it off, the parts of it that did work looked horrible on youtube, nothing like how it looks on my computer. The screen was small and shaky and just horrible quality. I'm wondering now if I need to reconvert it to .mp4 for youtube if that will help and make the quality better?

I don't know, I'm new at this and clearly don't know what I'm doing. And don't have the best tools to work with. But any help or advice would be great.

 

[Stark]

It sounds like you may not be able to recover that one part that you said keeps blacking out. If I was you, I'd attempt to re-record it if possible and try to redo the entire process.

I've imported a few things off of my PS4 from Twitch when I used to stream, so I could just download the video and I usually had little to no problems.

EDIT: This is a video I made where I streamed to Twitch, downloaded the Twitch video, cropped out the annoying part from the PS4 stream and then uploaded with no other sorts of maneuvering. Came out good enough for me.

 

[Walter White]

It sounds like you may not be able to recover that one part that you said keeps blacking out. If I was you, I'd attempt to re-record it if possible and try to redo the entire process.

I've imported a few things off of my PS4 from Twitch when I used to stream, so I could just download the video and I usually had little to no problems.

EDIT: This is a video I made where I streamed to Twitch, downloaded the Twitch video, cropped out the annoying part from the PS4 stream and then uploaded with no other sorts of maneuvering. Came out good enough for me.

Nice. Well I still have the original .mp4 on my computer. And also the original I formatted to like a .wmv . And it works fine when I just play it through a media player. Both of them. The trouble is after I edited and I think it's windows media player's fault because it sucks. It would be so much easier if an editing program could just take .mp4 clips the way they are without re-formatting, because I think that is part of the problem.

 

[Stark]

I use the VSDC Free Video Editor for the cropping and it's a lot more advanced than Movie Maker, but a lot harder to use and it has a ton of worthless features in it as well. Give it a Google search.

 

[Walter White]

I checked out how that original mp4 looked on youtube and it looked perfect. So the problems definitely come with the formatting and probably movie maker too. I need to use a video editor that can use mp4's.

 

[Sumac13]

Look into Blender ( http://www.blender.org/features/ ). Free.

While it is a lot more than a video editor, it can be used as such. If you use it as a video editor many of the features will not be of use. If wanting to use it as a video editor, you can find plenty of information on the web as how to use Blender as such. Be warned, there will be a learning curve to using it. That said, it is stable and a serious workhorse.

 

[KCOTT]

Sony Vegas is a smaller but powerful program, better than Windows Movie Maker. After that comes Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I would recommend starting with Sony Vegas. You can find it on torrent sites if you go that route, or you can pay I think $20/month for one program from the Adobe collection in which case I would get Adobe Premiere CC.

 

[Shakalu M.D.]

When I worked for the library I was the one who did all the video editing of their special events. I used Premiere and After Effects like KCott suggested. It's simple enough to use, but it's also advanced enough to be professional.

It's also great because it gives you the ability to do multicam editing if you ever happen to want to go that far.

That's what I'd go with.

 

[Walter White]

When I worked for the library I was the one who did all the video editing of their special events. I used Premiere and After Effects like KCott suggested. It's simple enough to use, but it's also advanced enough to be professional.

It's also great because it gives you the ability to do multicam editing if you ever happen to want to go that far.

That's what I'd go with.

Multicam? Explain that.

I was wondering how people can make videos where they like clone themselves and have 2 of themselves talking to each other in one frame. From what I can tell, it's like a split screen and they just make it look like it's one shot. You can find the seam if it isn't edited perfectly. Is it more advanced programs that can do that?

 

[Shakalu M.D.]

Well to be frank I've never even attempted something like that. I'd imagine that you could do it in after effects and premiere, but I haven't tried.

Multicam editing is just where you have more than one camera recording the same scene from different angles. You go into the program and adjust the recordings so they are perfectly synchronized. Then you can view all the angles at the same time and select which shot you go with.

for instance at the library when an author came in to speak I would set one camera straight across from them, and two more at an angle to the left and right. Then I'd watch all 3 while editing and choose the recording that had the best shot at the time. It was huge because speakers tend to move around, so the best shot isn't always from the same angle.

Think of how the shot always changes during a sitcom, same thing. With premiere and 3 cameras you can make a professional looking sitcom.