A Guide to Professional Video Editing Software
Video Editing Software Buyer's Guide:
- Video Editing Hardware: What You’ll Need To Get Started
- A Guide To Free Video Editing Software
- A Guide To Inexpensive Video Editing Software
- A Guide To Professional Video Editing Software
Ready for the big-bucks big time?
There’s no way, in a single article, to fairly describe or compare the depth and breadth of these powerful, professional appliances. And, of course, each of you is coming at this exercise from differing needs and goals. So, I’ll vector toward striking the high points – and singing the sour notes – of each toolkit in an abbreviated effort to give you a sense of their flavors. That, at least, will save you some time when you embark upon your own deep diving expeditions…
Shodan Edit Ninja — Advanced Video Editing Software
The quanta will now leap. You aren’t satisfied with the features of basic editing packages. You want professional results. You need advanced utensils. May I assume that you’re intending to make serious money with them?
Caution: it’s one thing to work on your own projects at you own pace, but quite another to service the needs of clients. Your customers will want all three sides of the creative triangle: Fine Quality/High Speed/Low Cost. You’re going to have to learn to fly on your NLE. And it has to be good enough to keep you aloft.
You may need to bump your hardware up too. Pop over to our recommended hardware configurations to see how much horsepower you’ll require. Check out the hardware discussion in our Video Editing: what Do You Need? Part 1.
Get an even bigger disk. You may be working on longer form shows, a gravitational effect of convergence/democratization. Some “pro-sumer” price-point cameras are spitting out true 4K video now.
Learn to love RAID arrays. It merely sucks when you lose a week of work on your personal project. It’s a total catastrophe if you blow up a client’s job. And if you need to keep projects for later revision, you must have a media management strategy. This is the least fun—but most necessary—part of high-end editing.
Consider doubling up on your GPU. Maybe the most fun of having a capable editor driving a powerful platform is dropping in high-end visual effects plug-ins like those from BorisFx. Or get your kicks “round-tripping” elements out to a parallel universe of specialty tools as one can on Planet Adobe between Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Professional video tools and ever-faster processors confer great creative power. We can do wonders on our own, in seclusion, like monks masterfully illuminating a manuscript.
But something has gotten lost on the way to the edit room in this last decade: the producer in the room. Several of my broadcast editor-friends complain of the growing gap between the editor and the show; a physical and psychic disconnect from the other creative trades on projects. Written in our DNA, a time when we used to invent, share, embellish and, yes, edit stories around the fire. As recently as the turn of the 21st century, we huddled like a family in an edit suite. Now, we DropBox low-res reference cuts to tiny phone screens to wait for notes and approvals from distracted clients. No real-time creative interaction.