Making Your Movie – Post-production – Editing – Hardware/Software

Tim Westland (Moderator) ~ 6/16/2012 8:07 PM

Making Your Movie – Post-production – Editing – Hardware/Software

I have a PC… I have a Mac… what is the best software to use? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each? How long do they take to learn and master?

Tell us what you can about which software gives us the best bang for our buck?

Pia Cook (Level 5) ~ 7/28/2012 7:36 PM

I have some low light grainy issues with my pirate short. We used my hvx200 and a Canon dslr. Same problem with both. Does anyone know of any fixes or at least make it a little better? Is anyone familiar with Neat Video www.neatvideo.com/examples.html ?...Rusty?........... :)

Rustom Irani (Moderator) ~ 7/29/2012 11:32 AM

How grainy are talking here, Pia? :)

Also, which DSLR did you use? Must be really low-light for a DSLR to produce grainy images.

Software like Neatvideo works okayish or well, when most of the footage is similar, usually stable and with similar compositions.

Otherwise, the settings it applies to one shot don't work for another and you end up re-tweaking even individual frames at times.

Are you using FCP or Premiere?

There are a few workarounds for grainy issues using the tools you have in your editing or post-processing suite.

Matthew Fettig (Level 5) ~ 7/29/2012 2:19 PM

Tim - I've used Final Cut Studio and, to a lesser degree, Adobe Premier Pro. FC seemed to be more common and, for my skills, we.as a bit more intuitive. However, Premier seems to be picking up a greater following among the DSLR crowd do it's easier ingestion of media from the cameras with the release of CS6.

I'd recommend www.lynda.com if you want to get some excellent training on either product. The monthly subscription fee is $37.50 if you want access to the demo files used in the training ($25/month without).

One thing I don't' like about Premier is that all the tools and controls seem so small, even now that I'm relying on reading glasses!

For hardware, I bought a Mac Pro form a guy in LA who resells equipment from the post houses down there. As they upgrade their hardware each year, he takes the old stuff, cleans it up, and resells it. I paid $3,000 and it came loaded with volume licenses for the entire Apple suite of software, the entire Adobe suite of software, Office for Mac, and almost every possible third-party add-on you can think of.

Pia Cook (Level 5) ~ 7/29/2012 4:33 PM

Thanks Rusty!!

Pretty grainy in my opinion. Very disappointed about that to be honest. It didn't look that dark when we were there. On the beach at night. We didn't even use all the lights we had.

I don't know what Canon he used. I don't remember. If anything his footage looks worse. I swear this will be my last shoot in the dark!! :)

Thanks for telling me about keeping the footage similar for simplicity. Didn't think of that, but it makes complete sense.

We are using FCP and I have AE as well. NeatVidoehave versions for both.