Video Editing Software - a bit boaty

I use Serif Movie Plus on my PC. I have had it a few years (2014). It cost £19.95. I followed the manual and produced an adequate result.
 
I use VSDC Free Video Editor for the small amount of non-linear editing I do.

The basic free package has got pretty much all you need, and the paid upgrade is very reasonable, cheap even, though whether you need it or not....
 
Eygthene said:
I use Serif Movie Plus on my PC. I have had it a few years (2014). It cost £19.95. I followed the manual and produced an adequate result.
Click to expand...
I also bought this and never used it until last week.. I found it very easy to use and ceated a 5 minute sailing video with 33 short video clips and 3 photographs. I thought the result was great, BUT as it is now a discontinued you cannot convert the video into a format for uploading to YouTube. Serif have stopped paying for the licence to do the conversion and there is nothing on the internet to do the conversion. This was very annoying as I was going to use it to show how much extra speed you can get froma spinnaker over a pole out genoa in the recent thread "How often do you use a spinnaker". How often do you use a spinnaker

So I have been trying a number of free video editors. I found Avidemux fairly complexe to use and lacking many features like a timeline, so I stopped using it. The next one which I am trying is OpenShot and will probably continue to use this as it is fairly similar to use as MoviePlus X6. As it is an open source program, it does contain some very clever effects but to get the best effects they have to be created using either Blender and/or Inkscape - both are free to download. Once I have got my head round how I want my video to work, I will load it to YouTube and place a link on this forum.

My avatar photo was taken by the larger boat in the video that I outsailed. The title will be "Concerto under spinnaker" and all the video clips were taken on on my mobile phone. 7th July 2017 was a beautiful day as I travelled from Cowes to Eastbourne and almost perfect spnnaker conditions to leave the spinnaker cleated and on Concerto autpilot. I have enjoyed watching these clips and finally realised I had enough to make an interesting video. It was over 10 minutes before I started cropping to enhance the effect of being under sail. Many will be pleased to hear it will have no music, just the sound of the waves. I will try and reduce some of the wind noise in a couple of the clips as it is distracting, or I might replace the sound on these clips if I can work out how to do it.
 
MovieMaker 2012 was a very good program, apart from only being able to handle one soundtrack + the video sound, it would do most things very well. No fancy features which is sometimes a good thing.

It's been replaced in Windows 10 by Photos which may be worth looking at or you may have an old computer with a clean copy of MM on it.

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I only edit simple projects and for amateur use or maybe the odd YouTube post and find some semi pro software too time consuming to master. I’ve settled on OpenShot. It’s perfect for simpletons, yet pretty sophisticated behind the scenes.
 
I use Shotcut on my home PC - quite straightforwards and allows you to create HTML5 overlays - you can get some quite smart transitions and reactive changes. Can even for instance have a single lower third that adds the text at render time.
 
The more I look at OpenShot, the more impressed I am becoming. This YouTube video I found explains in some detail how to start using it and many of the special effects to make a good video including how to separate sound from a video and use or delete either part..
 
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