In YOUR opinion which movie editer is most reliable

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Gemberkoekje
Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2005 11:42 pm
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Post by Gemberkoekje » Sat Jan 15, 2005 7:11 am

Personally kinda like Avisynth/VdubMod combi... free and never let me down yet...
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mantlepicture
Joined: Sat Apr 06, 2002 11:19 am
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Post by mantlepicture » Wed Jan 19, 2005 7:10 am

Avid. Not opinion. Fact. It's the industry standard, and you simply cannot be a professional editor if you cannot use Avid.

It's complicated to learn, but once you do, it is much quicker than novice programs like Premeire(real editors frown on drag-and-dropping, and other such bad-habit-forming shortcuts).

And if you really want reliability, you pretty much need a Mac. I'm not some dumbass Windows hater(I am typing this on a Windows XP machine), but Mac is best for editing. But this is about software.

If you want to try Avid, you can get Avid Xpress Free for... well, free. It's extremely crippled(only two audio and video tracks), but if you have been using WMM, it will be a vast improvement.

I think a lot of the reason Avid gets overlooked in the AMV community(notice how no one mentioned it in this thread, despite it being the best out there) is because of availability. It requires a dongle hooked into the back of your computer, so it's very hard to get an illegal copy. But make no mistake, it is the best. You can get Pro for $300 at Studica.com(if you have access to a student ID), and DV for even less.

If you have Xpress Pro, there will be no limits to what you can do with Avid(it's only real problems are the title tool and chroma-keying, which you will rarely use... and there are easy ways around that). Even if you get into advanced matting(if you don't know what it is, you won't care anyway), all you need is Photoshop.

Premeire is a solid program, but it's more for beginners. Final Cut is a great program, but if you are going to spend that much, you may as well go a little bit extra and get the superior Avid.

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rose4emily
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Post by rose4emily » Sat Jan 22, 2005 12:54 pm

I have to think the stability of an editing app has at least as much to do with what you're doing and how you're going about it as it does with the design of the actual application.

For instance, I happen to favor Cinelerra. This is partially because I'm a broke college student and the words "open source" are probably the most attractive single feature an application can have, as seen through the eyes of a broke college student (who refuses to use "warez"). It also has to do with the fact that Cinelerra is a real bitch to get used to, but actually very flexible once you've done so. It has less in the way of prepared FX than most professional-grade editors, but it does have a lot of slick compositing features, frame-accurate editing, background rendering, support for networked "render farms", support for 64-bit hardware platforms, support for unlimited audio and video input channels (well, system resources will probably fill up at some point), the ability to produce full surround audio output. Package it with MEncoder, FFMPEG, and Transcode - and you have a pretty kick-ass system that can deal with anything you want it to work with.

When I first started using Cinelerra, however, I was somewhat irritated by the fact that it seemed to crash all the time. Like Word did on Windows 3.1, minus the BSOD. Of course, I was trying to edit DivX3 and DivX4 video with MP3 audio, and set up the preferences all wrong for my system.

Use it to work with DV and PCM audio, however, and make sure it's configured properly, and I've yet to see it crash. Bassically, it's a pretty reliable editor if you know what you're doing.

Now I happen to favor a combination of command-line utilities and shell-scripts as editing tools, and have found that the most powerful of all video editing suites is a text-based application called the Bash Shell, wrapped around a handfull of useful utilities. You can do anything you want to do if you know what you're doing (and you're a masochist - I felt that was something I should mention).

As to the purpose of After Effects, a lot of animators actually use it to create original animations as a sort of "virtual crane". Scan your drawings/cells, use After Effects to position and composite them for each frame, and add any filters you feel are appropriate to dress up the scene. It's not really meant to be an "editing" app - but it can be used as such for such short projects as music videos.
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bum
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Post by bum » Sat Jan 22, 2005 7:29 pm

mantlepicture wrote: I think a lot of the reason Avid gets overlooked in the AMV community(notice how no one mentioned it in this thread, despite it being the best out there) is because of availability. It requires a dongle hooked into the back of your computer, so it's very hard to get an illegal copy.
So now your accusing all amv'ers of being software pirates?

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Psygnius
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Post by Psygnius » Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:54 am

I agree with the person that said Avid. It's definitely the best program out there for any type of editing. Of course, I can't afford to get a full Avid system, so I got the step down (the obsolete standard in the industry [however I think UPN is still using M100]....).... Media100. Not to mention, both of these programs run only on the Mac platform (the only real thing they're good for).

Media 100 is still an expensive system if you want the up-to-date versions (I ended up getting a ghetto version on eBay), but the simplicity of capturing specific sections of video in M100 and Avid truly make the programs well worth it. Also, not to metion how versitile they can be. Rendering effects and transitions are really simple, but M100 only has two layers of video. One thing that they made sure to add in the later versions is the ability to import to AfterEffects and Boris Graffitti (grr... I hate Boris, never learned to use it right... I miss CG Studio).

Anyways, if you have an unlimited supply of money, do check out Avid if you can, and if you have a couple of thousands to spend, do look into a lower end Media100 system.

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