Tools I use for Editing

Here is a post idea I should have thought of sooner, I have so many people asking me what tools I use to make my videos so why not make a blog of it?

There are plenty of tools I use and I'll provide a list below. Following the list there will be an explanation of the tool and what I use it for:

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
Adobe Flash CS3
Fraps 2.7.2
Cool Edit Pro 2.0
Paint Shop Pro 7
Camtasia Studio 6
VirtualDubMod 1.6.0.0 Surround
Xilisoft Video Converter 3

Those are the main tools I use to create videos. I'll do another post about the Emulators I use for gaming later. So lets start with Premiere...

Adobe Premiere Pro is an excellent tool for editing video...if you can afford the $800 cost and have a powerful enough machine to handle it. Since I use the tool so often, the $800 seems pretty much worth it but that's still a huge chunk of cash. The biggest issue I have is the constant crashing...it almost seems random. Most of the time it works but when it comes to Exporting the video, that's when I have glitches.

When using any video editing program, always be sure to import video RAW and not compressed with DIVX or something else. See, I usually can't be bothered to use RAW video and that's why it crashes when exporting (most of the time). I can't tell you how frustrating it is to spend days working on a video to get stuck at the very end when you're trying to export it and it keeps crashing.

Anyway, enough bad mouthing Premiere, it's actually a really good program, why else would I keep using it? I do most if not all my video editing here, even the animations (for the most part).

Above is a screen shot of the "Another World" video I'm working on. As you can see, it looks like a jumbled mess. The bottom half of the screen shot is all the spliced audio and video. The top half are preview windows and to the left of the preview windows are all my uploaded/imported files. It's actually much easier than it looks. Fortunately, a friend of mine (Miles) got me into using this program, he started teaching me and from there I taught myself. Of course, there are a lot of online tutorials on Youtube itself that can show you how to use Premiere.

You're better off getting this program on a MAC, I hear it's much more stable there. On my old machine, this program didn't run so well, you need a good processor, lots of RAM, lots and lots of hard drive space because believe me, when you start using RAW video, you hard drive space runs out fast. I have over 1TB of space so I'm all set.

There are other alternatives like "Vegas Video" or "Final Cut Pro" but these are more high end stuff. For cheap or free stuff, there is Windows Movie Maker or Virtualdub but those are more basic. Check out this site for a list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software

This post was just to give you an idea of what video editing program I use, this wasn't meant to be a tutorial by any means. If anyone ever wants any suggestions on how to do some of the things that I do, just comment on this post or message me on Youtube.

Next post I'll talk about some of the other programs I use.