Yes. Adobe Lightroom for example is my favorite app. So polished, capable and fast and runs fine even on weaker machines.I agree 100%.
However, Adobe's products are pretty much a "killer app" in the realm of video editing so I bit the bullet and subscribed.
What video editing software you guys using?
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Turn11
Well-Known Member
OK, good Lenovo laptop. I am not into color adjusting. Primarily intend to use SW to cut out bad sections then join them together. I might add music, I might fade in additional movies.
Free is good but Adobe Premier is way too much power. I had gotten to page 3 and a LOT of suggestions were iDevices or Adobe. Suggestions please
Free is good but Adobe Premier is way too much power. I had gotten to page 3 and a LOT of suggestions were iDevices or Adobe. Suggestions please
Prismatic
Well-Known Member
I'm very new to all this: first drone, first video editing experience. My credentials are A) a background in large-format still photography, B) an ancient B.S. degree in Film & Television Production, and C) a career in software engineering.
I first tried Corel VideoStudio Pro. I hit a showstopper with it: despite deep interaction with the very friendly and helpful support people, it was impossible to get that software to recognize and use the Nvidia Quadro K620 graphics adapter. I got my money back.
Now I have Cyberlink PowerDirector 16. It at least engages the graphics card (yay), but I am not especially happy with it:
1) At any production resolution from 4K on down, the "native" fade transitions are grainy. Instead of a scene fading into or out of a fog, it fades in or out of sugar (4K) or sand (2k) or millet seed (1080p), or pea gravel (720p). The package I bought included a "proDAD" sampler; its fade transition is better, but imperfect. Rather than grainy/noisy, the transition has a subtle but strange "electrical discharge" effect. I've found no workaround to either.
2) Producing 4K is spotty. A transition that works fine at 2K fails at 4K (it turns into an equivalent length blackout) if the project calls for "too much". As an example, I have a 2-second transition between two reversed clips that include exposure and timing adjustments. In 2K that works; in 4K, it's a 2-second blackout. The transition works in 4K if I remove the reversal from either clip.
3) Output in 2K or 4K cannot be uploaded to YouTube; it gets reformatted to 640 x 50 (you read that right) and there's nothing I've found to help. I've tweaked every output parameter in PowerDirector, to no avail. This composite screen capture illustrates. I overlaid the basic file specs with a purple drop-shadow:
View media item 1855
This is the video in question, in 1080p:
View media item 1850
I first tried Corel VideoStudio Pro. I hit a showstopper with it: despite deep interaction with the very friendly and helpful support people, it was impossible to get that software to recognize and use the Nvidia Quadro K620 graphics adapter. I got my money back.
Now I have Cyberlink PowerDirector 16. It at least engages the graphics card (yay), but I am not especially happy with it:
1) At any production resolution from 4K on down, the "native" fade transitions are grainy. Instead of a scene fading into or out of a fog, it fades in or out of sugar (4K) or sand (2k) or millet seed (1080p), or pea gravel (720p). The package I bought included a "proDAD" sampler; its fade transition is better, but imperfect. Rather than grainy/noisy, the transition has a subtle but strange "electrical discharge" effect. I've found no workaround to either.
2) Producing 4K is spotty. A transition that works fine at 2K fails at 4K (it turns into an equivalent length blackout) if the project calls for "too much". As an example, I have a 2-second transition between two reversed clips that include exposure and timing adjustments. In 2K that works; in 4K, it's a 2-second blackout. The transition works in 4K if I remove the reversal from either clip.
3) Output in 2K or 4K cannot be uploaded to YouTube; it gets reformatted to 640 x 50 (you read that right) and there's nothing I've found to help. I've tweaked every output parameter in PowerDirector, to no avail. This composite screen capture illustrates. I overlaid the basic file specs with a purple drop-shadow:
View media item 1855
This is the video in question, in 1080p:
View media item 1850
If you are not into editing very detaily, I am using hit film express which is free and there are a lot of videos on how to use.
HitFilm Express: Free editing & VFX software - fxhome.com
If you need details you can buy add-ons.
HitFilm Express: Free editing & VFX software - fxhome.com
If you need details you can buy add-ons.
I have had problems with transitions in 4k videos too, it would skip frames around transitions. Lower resolution works. Since then I have built a new desktop and just waiting for some new footage to edit! I guess it pretty much comes down to your hardware.
It's worth giving Davinci Resolve 15 a try, especially since you can't beat the price (free). I wasn't expecting too much, but it's a full production studio quality and featured system. I don't do anything in 4k myself, so I can't say too much about how well it does there.
I know I am late to the party and hopefully can add something valuable to this conversation. Apologize in advance for the length.
There is no single answer to your question, it all depends on what you do with your edits. On the simple side, mostly for fun or quick inspection videos I also use LumaFusion on my Apple Ipad Pro. I must say, that program is capable, easy to use, fast and portable. I can edit on the go, sit on vacation and post fun videos, do just about anything you would want to produce fun videos. So if that is what you are doing, and your input files are not that big (at the mercy of the Ipad storage capacity) for fun videos or short clips of interesting flights that is a great product and I have cut many videos with it.
That being said for most of my commercial work I had to learn how to use the features in Premier Pro in order to get the quality video you need to impress your customer. Of course that program can do just about anything and when editing H.264 or H.265 with a pretty decent user experience. However you do need some decent equipment, and that is unfortunately, part of the answer to your original question. I started off with a home built computer, I5 7600K with 48 gigs of DDR4 Ram, a Samsung SSD and a EVGA 1060 video card. I spent most of my money on the huge curved Dell monitor which was well worth it. Using Premier with standard 4k video was "ok", nothing to really write home about. I would often get choppy video on playback during editing and no matter how I tuned the system it never was smooth. I would have to periodically stop the playback, wait for the cache to catch up and then start it again. Transitioning from clip to clip was the worst. So with that in mind you will probably not love the Premier Pro option unless your willing to spend more money on the hardware, or suck it up because it will do the job and you can do just about anything, as long as you are proficient at searching YouTube for tutorials.
My experience with Premier Pro was excruciatingly painful when I needed to edit high resolution Apple ProRes 422 HQ and Apple ProRes 4444 XQ, not to mention the impossible task of editing video in CinemaDNG. I film most of my promotional commercial work with the Inspire 2's and Zenmuse x5s. At times that became almost impossible to stomach in Premier Pro with my hardware setup. I then took the plunge and tried DaVinci Resolve because many on-line video comparisons had this product kicking butt over Premier Pro with the available resources. I installed Resolve and it definitely improved the experience and made high resolution possible on my hardware. Not great mind you but possible. The only thing I didn't like is that I had to use DaVinci Fusion to get some of the effects that I wanted which were possible in Premier Pro directly.
So back to the hardware for a solution. What ultimately solved my problem with the editor was something I already suspected. I upgraded to the EVGA 1080TI with 11MB on board memory (needed a liquid cooler), a I7 8700K overclocking to 4.7GHz, and had to get a new motherboard.
So I went back to Premier Pro because it had more features built in. The down side of Permier Pro in my opinion is the ongoing monthly fee, I don't like that at all, and to get even better effects you need to use other Adobe products. This is a very frustrating problem.
Fast forward to this month actually. I downloaded and installed the new Resolve (15) and started using that product and soon found out that by buying the Resolve 15 Studio ($300) I actually received all the Fusion stuff I so loved in the Resolve product. So I am back on to Resolve because Resolve to me is easier to use, much much faster than PP, the workflow is better, the new fusion work flow is amazing and I have yet to even scratch the surface on that, and for $300 you get your license and that's it.
One last thing, I just did an upgrade that had the biggest impact of all for me. One thing that will always hold yo back on any editing software is the size of your input files and when you are editing Cine or Prores those file sizes are huge. I shot 15 minutes of video last Friday and racked up a whopping 150GB of video on my CineSSD. I was complaining to my son (my computer guy) that working with files this huge and moving them around or in and out of cache memory in these programs is terrible. He told me that my new motherboard that he told me to purchase had the ability to accept the new NVMeSSD. I asked him what the heck was that and he told me it was a new class of SSD's that are mounted on the mother board if you have the capability and utilize the ultra fast "highway bus" for data transfer. So I purchased a 1 TB Samsung 950 PRO M.2, installation was easy, plug and play. It is now dedicated to video editing. I move all my files for a project and edit off of this drive. When done I archive the project to another storage media. There is nothing else I can say about this except that it's truly amazing and probably one of the most measurable and significant improvements I have made to my editing experience. The sequential read/writes of this SSD is bench marked at over 2,222 MB/sec and trust me, it does it. That's 2.2 G "Bytes" per second, incredible. I often wondered if I had left my original hardware alone and upgraded to this SSD first if that would have solved my problems.
Conclusion. I have settled on the hardware described above and DaVinci Resolve 15 for all of my video editing needs with the exception of the quick fun stuff I still use LimaFusion for, and I do love that product also. It's just not capable of handling the type of high end editing that I typically need to do.
Hope this helps
There is no single answer to your question, it all depends on what you do with your edits. On the simple side, mostly for fun or quick inspection videos I also use LumaFusion on my Apple Ipad Pro. I must say, that program is capable, easy to use, fast and portable. I can edit on the go, sit on vacation and post fun videos, do just about anything you would want to produce fun videos. So if that is what you are doing, and your input files are not that big (at the mercy of the Ipad storage capacity) for fun videos or short clips of interesting flights that is a great product and I have cut many videos with it.
That being said for most of my commercial work I had to learn how to use the features in Premier Pro in order to get the quality video you need to impress your customer. Of course that program can do just about anything and when editing H.264 or H.265 with a pretty decent user experience. However you do need some decent equipment, and that is unfortunately, part of the answer to your original question. I started off with a home built computer, I5 7600K with 48 gigs of DDR4 Ram, a Samsung SSD and a EVGA 1060 video card. I spent most of my money on the huge curved Dell monitor which was well worth it. Using Premier with standard 4k video was "ok", nothing to really write home about. I would often get choppy video on playback during editing and no matter how I tuned the system it never was smooth. I would have to periodically stop the playback, wait for the cache to catch up and then start it again. Transitioning from clip to clip was the worst. So with that in mind you will probably not love the Premier Pro option unless your willing to spend more money on the hardware, or suck it up because it will do the job and you can do just about anything, as long as you are proficient at searching YouTube for tutorials.
My experience with Premier Pro was excruciatingly painful when I needed to edit high resolution Apple ProRes 422 HQ and Apple ProRes 4444 XQ, not to mention the impossible task of editing video in CinemaDNG. I film most of my promotional commercial work with the Inspire 2's and Zenmuse x5s. At times that became almost impossible to stomach in Premier Pro with my hardware setup. I then took the plunge and tried DaVinci Resolve because many on-line video comparisons had this product kicking butt over Premier Pro with the available resources. I installed Resolve and it definitely improved the experience and made high resolution possible on my hardware. Not great mind you but possible. The only thing I didn't like is that I had to use DaVinci Fusion to get some of the effects that I wanted which were possible in Premier Pro directly.
So back to the hardware for a solution. What ultimately solved my problem with the editor was something I already suspected. I upgraded to the EVGA 1080TI with 11MB on board memory (needed a liquid cooler), a I7 8700K overclocking to 4.7GHz, and had to get a new motherboard.
So I went back to Premier Pro because it had more features built in. The down side of Permier Pro in my opinion is the ongoing monthly fee, I don't like that at all, and to get even better effects you need to use other Adobe products. This is a very frustrating problem.
Fast forward to this month actually. I downloaded and installed the new Resolve (15) and started using that product and soon found out that by buying the Resolve 15 Studio ($300) I actually received all the Fusion stuff I so loved in the Resolve product. So I am back on to Resolve because Resolve to me is easier to use, much much faster than PP, the workflow is better, the new fusion work flow is amazing and I have yet to even scratch the surface on that, and for $300 you get your license and that's it.
One last thing, I just did an upgrade that had the biggest impact of all for me. One thing that will always hold yo back on any editing software is the size of your input files and when you are editing Cine or Prores those file sizes are huge. I shot 15 minutes of video last Friday and racked up a whopping 150GB of video on my CineSSD. I was complaining to my son (my computer guy) that working with files this huge and moving them around or in and out of cache memory in these programs is terrible. He told me that my new motherboard that he told me to purchase had the ability to accept the new NVMeSSD. I asked him what the heck was that and he told me it was a new class of SSD's that are mounted on the mother board if you have the capability and utilize the ultra fast "highway bus" for data transfer. So I purchased a 1 TB Samsung 950 PRO M.2, installation was easy, plug and play. It is now dedicated to video editing. I move all my files for a project and edit off of this drive. When done I archive the project to another storage media. There is nothing else I can say about this except that it's truly amazing and probably one of the most measurable and significant improvements I have made to my editing experience. The sequential read/writes of this SSD is bench marked at over 2,222 MB/sec and trust me, it does it. That's 2.2 G "Bytes" per second, incredible. I often wondered if I had left my original hardware alone and upgraded to this SSD first if that would have solved my problems.
Conclusion. I have settled on the hardware described above and DaVinci Resolve 15 for all of my video editing needs with the exception of the quick fun stuff I still use LimaFusion for, and I do love that product also. It's just not capable of handling the type of high end editing that I typically need to do.
Hope this helps
I second this! LumaFusion for iPad mini 4 is awesome. No transferring to the MacBook. Easy, intuitive and brilliant. And ONLY $20
I've been using NVMe drives for a couple of years now - long enough that I forget it's new to many people. You are absolutely correct that this will have a *huge* performance impact for video editing where you have about the worst case scenario for drive performance...
Prismatic
Well-Known Member
Wow! Thanks @nuclearheli! I for one appreciate the time & effort to put together a thorough report like that.
My machine has an i7-6700 CPU sporting (only) 8GB RAM, with an NVidia Quadro K620 graphics card driving a Samsung 3840 X 2160 monitor. Not a beast, but not a wimp either.
Back on topic: a good editing solution (edging on, if not exactly professional) is probably within my reach. I'm a dilettante, a retired guy with a Mavic Air, visions of grandeur, and a modest budget.
My experiences so far with consumer-grade video editing tools has been disappointing. I just installed DaVinci Resolve, so I'll take that for a test drive.
Meanwhile, I'm definitely looking at a Samsung 1TB 970 EVO NVMe M.2 internal SSD. My motherboard has a PCIe port that fits a very spendy Dell accessory SSD, but I have to find out the rest of the specifications on that port and whether it's suitable. Working from an NVMe drive would be a dream; I just hope my machine would take it. Oh, and another 16GB of DDR-RAM might help, too.
My machine has an i7-6700 CPU sporting (only) 8GB RAM, with an NVidia Quadro K620 graphics card driving a Samsung 3840 X 2160 monitor. Not a beast, but not a wimp either.
Back on topic: a good editing solution (edging on, if not exactly professional) is probably within my reach. I'm a dilettante, a retired guy with a Mavic Air, visions of grandeur, and a modest budget.
My experiences so far with consumer-grade video editing tools has been disappointing. I just installed DaVinci Resolve, so I'll take that for a test drive.
Meanwhile, I'm definitely looking at a Samsung 1TB 970 EVO NVMe M.2 internal SSD. My motherboard has a PCIe port that fits a very spendy Dell accessory SSD, but I have to find out the rest of the specifications on that port and whether it's suitable. Working from an NVMe drive would be a dream; I just hope my machine would take it. Oh, and another 16GB of DDR-RAM might help, too.
Hello Dear,
You can use VidTrim video editing software. It is the best video editing software I have ever used before
You can use VidTrim video editing software. It is the best video editing software I have ever used before
Nice video! When you were going backwards right above the water were you in sport mode?
Thanks for extensive reply. You do have a monster machine! Just a little nitpick, upgrading to 1080ti - did it really help? I suspect that powerful/high end gfx card really helps in video editing. It is probably the i7-8700k oc'd CPU that is helping your case than anything else, unless of course you use your machine for gaming too, then 1080 is rightly justified.
Adobe Premiere is pretty CPU heavy, the most noticeable gains would likely be made with CPU, RAM, and SSD. Depending on exactly what you're doing though, the GPU does make a difference - certain things use it more heavily than others. Most people probably do not need a 1080Ti though unless they are going beyond 4K, and the GTX 1180's are coming out extremely soon so I would not buy one of those anyway right now unless for significant discount. I have a Nvidia Titan X (12GB) and while editing 4K it rarely uses more than 4GB of VRAM and doesn't go anywhere near 100% GPU utilization. My overclocked i7-7820X (4.7GHz on all 8 cores) on the other hand has all 16 threads slammed quite often.
Here are some links you may find useful...these guys do good (but not perfect) testing and help show where better GPU's make more of a difference:
Premiere Pro CC 2018 Workstation GPU Performance
Premiere Pro CC 2017.1.2 CPU Performance: Core i7 8700K, i5 8600K, i3 8350K
DaVinci Resolve 14 CPU Performance: Skylake-X vs Threadripper
Recommended System: Recommended Systems for Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Long story short, I don't think you need a 1080Ti to edit Mavic Air footage.
Last edited:
Adobe Premiere Pro + Neat Video - Ryzen 1700+ with 32GB RAM and an AMD Vega 64 video card. I have 0 issues and works quite well!
Here's a couple of my videos I edited from my Mavic Pro. I have yet to edit any of my Mavic Air recordings.
Here's a couple of my videos I edited from my Mavic Pro. I have yet to edit any of my Mavic Air recordings.
That's a very good configuration for almost everything! Nice videos. Where is Mirror lake?
Thanks for the links. I am in fact holding for 11 series cards to come out. Right now GPUs market is so crazy, there are no significant discounts, I will be lucky if find the cards at MSRP or with minimal discount. I did build rest of the system though: Ryzen 7 1700 (OC to 3900) 32GB RAM and M.2. SSD mITX machine with a rudimentary RX560 card that I bought on Craigslist.
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