A Guide To Professional Video Editing Software

[Guest]

You've read through our analysis of free and low-cost video editing suites. Now it's time to take a look at the industry's heavy-hitters: Avid, Adobe, Apple, EditShare, Sony and Grass Valley. Is there a best? That all depends on what you're trying to do.

A Guide To Professional Video Editing Software : Read more

 

[Spoogemonkey]

The absolute worst article on Tom's I've ever seen. Horribly overwritten and full of useless, embarrassing dribble. Pathetic.

 

[randomstranger9]

Commenting commentary... who are the commentariat who could comment on comments? A commenter!

See how annoying this kind of writing is?

 

[HormusPeston]

I loved this article. I've been editing since the days when tape was pre-striped and when "hit record" required a mental countdown during pre-roll. Like most professional editors, I can edit on pretty much any system that you throw at me. Placing the playhead where you want it and knowing the equivalents of XCVB and match-frame gets 90% of the job done. IOJKL is standard -- the Avid standard. I remember the older FinalCut versions had absolutely idiotic shortcuts -- I think D was mapped to "Duplicate clip" or something silly...

Cutting on the Avid is like being married: she grows on you and nothing else feels right. I've flirted with X, with Premiere CS6 and many others Incite, Edius, Media 100 but I still love my Avid. I carry my settings and jog shuttle with me.

I grinned broadly at the author's comparison of Lightworks to a flatbed! Of course it is! This is the only review I have read that distinguished between a young editor willing to learn new software and an old dog.

Thank you.

 

[beetlejuicegr]

New way of writing an article i have to admit. I guess the writer wanted to show the creational side of it, unlike the tools making you "send a low res pic on a small mobile screen to get the ok" as he says somewhere

Well sure after thousands of montage you will feel that way.

 

[joe_newbuilder]

Each of these softwares targets a different market segment and has different requirements. Some software no matter how great has no traction in that market. It is pretty important to be using the tools that others in your industry expect.

It is really important to see how these programs work with finishing tools. You really should use an editing program to do effects and color work because most of the time it limits the ability of professionals to collaborate using much higher quality tools geared to those tasks.

As far as markets I have seen Avid, Final Cut and Premiere used in feature motion pictures. Projects are commonly shared between parts of production. So the editors who are doing all the logging and tagging of performances may not be doing the final cuts of the work. Each platform as a way of exporting tagging and conforming media so that when you move from one system to another each person can know they are looking at the correct clips.

For episodic television Avid is all I see. The incredibly short schedules for TV pretty much live on the sharing infrastructure setup between AVID stations.

That is also market dependent, I have seen European shows edited on Quantel.

Unless you are big enough to make your own way, or so small you won't work with anyone else it's important to use what others in your field use

 

[Frankenstein002]

Using avid media composer for a couple of years now. Am hapy with it...