Video Editing: An easy way, Is there such a thing?

[FlyingFish]

I used to do a little bit of video editing years ago with Power Director. It did the job, but even making a short clip was a chore and took ages.

I've now started filming with a gopro, and I'm looking to edit the footage into small clips to upload for easy viewing. I paraglide and it looks great in 4K, but I only need clips of a few seconds each, and at quite specific moments, lots added up to make my film.

The thing is.... Unless I'm missing something, things haven't got any easier to do this, it still takes bloomin ages to find the small section of footage, then trim, add to time line, move on repeat.... get bored...give up etc..

I tried GoPro's own Quik, and my word what a mess! It seems to do its own thing and gives you very little freedom. But it has the right idea in terms of just grabbing a small bit and adding to your film. It only seems to do up to a minute, and 4k output is shocking quality (lot of users complaining about that)

What I would ideally like to do is just play back my recorded footage and while I'm watching press and hold a button (space bar for example) and that period/clip is added to the time line to make up my film automatically. So for example if I press 20 times, those 20 clips are added. Then I can move onto titles etc..

Is there such a thing?

Or can anyone recommend an easy method for short film making without it taking hours and hours, with high quality results.

Many Thanks.

 

[Scam]

Or can anyone recommend an easy method for short film making without it taking hours and hours, with high quality results.

I'm not a film maker, but I work in the industry. It sounds like you're asking for the moon on a stick. At the end of the day if you shoot hours and hours or material you've got to spend the time going through it. Modern movies can shoot anything from 1hr-10hrs of footage a day, why do you think they have teams of editors working to break it down. Why do you think they have teams of people making notes on-set and recording what are the preferred takes etc?

What I would ideally like to do is just play back my recorded footage and while I'm watching press and hold a button (space bar for example) and that period/clip is added to the time line to make up my film automatically. So for example if I press 20 times, those 20 clips are added. Then I can move onto titles etc..

Avid Media Composer actually has something called multicam editing which works in a similar way but you're pushing a button to change between an A and B camera. Like live editing. Perhaps you should Google that term to see what free software does the equivalent?

 

[iamtheoneneo]

Welcome to editing! Where the grind is real.
I work in the industry and as said above what your asking for is impractical and why people like me stay employed!
Honestly I would dump the lot into a timeline and just got through cutting anything half decent, you can then put it all together and edit further. It basically reads like you are trying to beat match which if that is the case then you just need to get your footage sorted before even attempting to introduce the beat.

Also your actual computer might be impacting how you do this, scrolling through clips should be smooth - If there is any lag then it gets frustrating fast and your computer is likely not up to the task of editing high bitrate content.

This by the way is also an important lesson in filming, as to be good at content creation you need to also be extremely calculated on what is being filmed, when your dealing with 100gb's of video files the hard drive space they go on = money lost.

All this comes with experience but the large majority of the professional industry ethos is just as relevant for a little amateur video that will end up on Youtube. Its just different in scale thats all.

The timeline below is work that I started this morning, During which I spent cutting up B Cam footage into 3-6 second clips that will cut into A Cam footage. Some of these clips were originally running between 10 - 60 seconds each. To get all B Cam footage edited correctly will likely take me until 6pm tonight.

 

[FlyingFish]

Thanks for the input chaps.
It looks like perhaps I was a bit naive to think software had made this job easier with the passing of time, especially nowadays with every man and his dog is filming and uploading

It's not as if I'm wanting anything broadcast quality, just brief moments, assembled into a short movie, that runs and looks good on YouTube.

I've hopefully got a fast enough PC for my little editing needs, it's a Ryzen 2700x with 16GB of fast ram, and a couple of 870Evo Ssd's. And it does seem to munch through 4k video in reasonable time. Although this is the first time I've seen nearly all the ram consumed!

I have come across a tidy little program called Openshot, which works quite will will for my small needs. II' still playing with it's features.

https://www.openshot.org

A quick edit.

Mick

 

[The_Abyss]

I think that a lot of effort, planning and editing goes into much of the YouTube content that people gravitate towards these days. It is far from an amateur operation.