Crash course in video editing, please?

[Mark Kaine]

So yeah, I'm recording with shadow play and 15 minutes use about 4GB which is obviously a bit too much. 

 

Whats an "easy to use program" that let's me reduce the size while keeping the image quality as good as possible, and also let's me actually edit, ie cutting parts and putting them together again without the cut parts? 

 

And, how'd I actually do it? 

 

Last time I tried DaVinci resolve and didn't like it at all, too slow, too complicated and just didn't do what I wanted... 

 

I'm currently using windows 10 photos app, which let's you trim but not cut, and also reduces quality quite a bit so not ideal. 

Alternatively I use windows movie maker, which is great, but also doesn't do a great job at compression, basically my edited videos are about the same size as unedited while trying to retain the image quality. 

 

Any suggestions, tips? 

 

Thanks. 

[jaslion]

Handbrake

[SupaKomputa]

Use handbrake to compress the movie with h264 codec, or h265 (better compression).

If you're new in editing Vegas is easy to learn.

[armyspas12]

I dont have a computer but i have an i pad and i use iMovie which does a pretty good job so if you have an iPad you could transfer the video and do it that way

 

[Mark Kaine]

9 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Handbrake

should have mentioned this, tried it, never found the "cut" function. 

Also it either made my videos pixelated or didn't really reduce the size at all (I think I used lossless as it was the only option I found that didn't look trash) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

9 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Use handbrake to compress the movie with h264 codec, or h265 (better compression).

If you're new in editing Vegas is easy to learn.

Ok but Vegas isn't free right? And I'd still need to use handbrake to compress? 

 

That really seems more complicated than it should be haha. I wish they never replaced movie maker, which was perfect at its time with "photos app" which as said doesn't even have a cut function.

 

 

8 minutes ago, armyspas12 said:

I dont have a computer but i have an i pad and i use iMovie which does a pretty good job so if you have an iPad you could transfer the video and do it that way

 

I don't have an apple device but I thought of that, there's a million video editing apps on Android but it's also not feasible as it would need to be quick and the ones I tried reduced quality also a lot. 

 

Ah, well I see it doesn't seem to be easy, but maybe there's a simple to use program for windows that does a good job with this out there... 

[Sharif]

Hate to break it to you, but the only solution is more tutorials and more practice 

 

It's no different than getting better at riding a motorcycle, read more about the techniques and skills to improve on, keep riding! 

[SupaKomputa]

Well handbrake is the defacto compression software.

You produce movies from any software will endup using handbrake if you want to have nice compressions.

Yes vegas isn't free, but if you want to step up to a better editing software than movie maker, i recommend it.

If you have more time, learning davinci or premiere is a good option, if you wanna get serious.

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, Sharif said:

Hate to break it to you, but the only solution is more tutorials and more practice 

 

It's no different than getting better at riding a motorcycle, read more about the techniques and skills to improve on, keep riding! 

ya, but it should just be like movie maker, you don't need any knowledge it basically explains everything by itself, only real issue is the compression isn't that great, and it only supports up to 1080p, because it was made in medieval times...

 

 

3 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Well handbrake is the defacto compression software.

You produce movies from any software will endup using handbrake if you want to have nice compressions.

Yes vegas isn't free, but if you want to step up to a better editing software than movie maker, i recommend it.

If you have more time, learning davinci or premiere is a good option, if you wanna get serious.

I see, well let's start at the beginning then, what's a good setting for compression then?  I could never figure that out. As said I record with shadow play, at ~40kbps (I guess?) either at 30 or 60 fps at 1080p... 

 

Btw that's also a thing I would love doing... upscale the videos so they're 4k, that should be easily possible, right? (but probably more of an advanced thing lol)  

[jaslion]

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

ya, but it should just be like movie maker, you don't need any knowledge it basically explains everything by itself, only real issue is the compression isn't that great, and it only supports up to 1080p, because it was made in medieval times...

 

 

I see, well let's start at the beginning then, what's a good setting for compression then?  I could never figure that out. As said I record with shadow play, at ~40kbps (I guess?) either at 30 or 60 fps at 1080p... 

 

Btw that's also a thing I would love doing... upscale the videos so they're 4k, that should be easily possible, right? (but probably more of an advanced thing lol)  

Dirty upscaling is literally setting the video res to 4k and letting it re encode which increases the size but does not increase quality as it is still 1080p footage

[Sharif]

57 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

ya, but it should just be like movie maker, you don't need any knowledge it basically explains everything by itself, only real issue is the compression isn't that great, and it only supports up to 1080p, because it was made in medieval times...

 

 

I see, well let's start at the beginning then, what's a good setting for compression then?  I could never figure that out. As said I record with shadow play, at ~40kbps (I guess?) either at 30 or 60 fps at 1080p... 

 

Btw that's also a thing I would love doing... upscale the videos so they're 4k, that should be easily possible, right? (but probably more of an advanced thing lol)  

What stops you from using that, missing features? Advanced editing techniques that are nice to have, cool colour grading options, more in dept audio layering? Oh no it's starting to add up, it's limited for a good reason, it's meant to be simple and easy to work with without any knowhow of editing.

If you want to do anything remotely intermediate, you'll have to work for it.

[Mark Kaine]

14 minutes ago, Sharif said:

What stops you from using that, missing features? Advanced editing techniques that are nice to have, cool colour grading options, more in dept audio layering? Oh no it's starting to add up, it's limited for a good reason, it's meant to be simple and easy to work with without any knowhow of editing.

If you want to do anything remotely intermediate, you'll have to work for it.

you mean movie maker? well I'll probably keep using it but like I said the real downside is the compression, or re encoding (?) I basically have to use same or similar bitrates or otherwise it looks shit... Can't even use handbrake or something because you *have* to re encode / compress it otherwise it obviously won't save the edited video... 

 

I mean I see, I just hoped there was a more modern alternative that's as easy to use. 

 

PS: just in case it wasn't clear, I want fast, easy editing and good quality compression without artefacting... no artsy stuff lol 

 

I gotta say even though it lowers the bitrate seemingly at random quite a bit the windows app isn't actually bad, it's just missing a cut or merge function basically. (it does have trim at least) 

[Sharif]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

you mean movie maker? well I'll probably keep using it but like I said the real downside is the compression, or re encoding (?) I basically have to use same or similar bitrates or otherwise it looks shit... Can't even use handbrake or something because you *have* to re encode / compress it otherwise it obviously won't save the edited video... 

 

I mean I see, I just hoped there was a more modern alternative that's as easy to use. 

 

PS: just in case it wasn't clear, I want fast, easy editing and good quality compression without artefacting... no artsy stuff lol 

 

I gotta say even though it lowers the bitrate seemingly at random quite a bit the windows app isn't actually bad, it's just missing a cut or merge function basically. (it does have trim at least) 

My bad, thought you meant getting better at editing video in general.

 

If that's the case, honestly once you get the hang of resolve, you can fly through it pretty quickly. I was switching from Premier to that, initially it was weird with everything being differently done, but once I got used to it, for simple quick edits, I can shoot it out way faster than I could in Premier, or Hitfilm express another one I tried before settling on resolv, since hitman express was just trying way too hard to be premier, but with features that really didn't match it. 

[SupaKomputa]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

ya, but it should just be like movie maker, you don't need any knowledge it basically explains everything by itself, only real issue is the compression isn't that great, and it only supports up to 1080p, because it was made in medieval times...

 

 

I see, well let's start at the beginning then, what's a good setting for compression then?  I could never figure that out. As said I record with shadow play, at ~40kbps (I guess?) either at 30 or 60 fps at 1080p... 

 

Btw that's also a thing I would love doing... upscale the videos so they're 4k, that should be easily possible, right? (but probably more of an advanced thing lol)  

Upscaling to 4K? Why you wanna do that? It would make the image worse.

It's duplicating 1 dot (pixel) to fill up 4 pixels.

 

40kbps is a very low number, a 1080p usually 5-10 mbps, i suspect it was 40 KB/s not kbps, so it's around 320 kbps, which is still very low.

 

For shadowplay i suggest HIGH QUALITY settings, 1080p 30fps with 5mbps bitrate.

Quality : compression, the lower the worse image quality.

Resolution : higher resolution, higher filesize.

FPS : higher fps, higher filesize.

bitrate : lower bitrate, lower quality.

 

 

[LogicalDrm]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

like I said the real downside is the compression, or re encoding (?) I basically have to use same or similar bitrates or otherwise it looks shit... Can't even use handbrake or something because you *have* to re encode / compress it otherwise it obviously won't save the edited video... 

So whats the hardware you are working with? Complaining about slowness of software, be it editing or encoding, means that you are trying to work with high resolution/bitrate material with older hardware. With that you really don't win anything by going with another software. For example Hitfilm Express and Resolve have about same time to encode same video.

 

To my knowledge, any time you change video aspects of anyway (length, content, quality), you need to re-encode it. Though I've heard that you could trim from start and end without needing to do full encoding. So I feel like you fear the word "encoding" and relate it to something its not. Encoding by itself doesn't do anything to media. You decide what the end result is. Like with using Handbrake, choose wrong preset and you get 3x file size compared to original, when you were expecting 0.25x the size. Encoding is still being performed, just aspects of it are different.

 

I've gone through several video editors in the past. From Premiere and Corel Video Studio to Windows Movie Maker to AVS4YOU to Blender VSC and now Resolve. And some testing with HitFilm and Shotcut. Resolve is better than most. I use it in combination with Handbrake. Editing, and double encoding 30-60min videos takes some 8h total.

[Mark Kaine]

8 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

whats the hardware you are working with?

It's in my sig, tried a bunch of programs including resolve on the Ryzen PC, but I use movie maker on my laptop as it's fast enough, 10 minutes video takes about 20 minutes to edit and *re encode*

 

Really the biggest issue with those other programs is I don't know how to set the encoder, I did like people on the internet suggested and it's either really slow, really bad quality or a combination there of... also sometimes I'd get really great image quality but the video would be very laggy, so again, idk how to set stuff and I kinda gave up because it's frustrating and the results almost always awful...

this goes especially for "Handbrake" which was so frustrating its currently not installed and I didn't really plan to reinstall it either.

 

8 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

Resolve is better than most. I use it in combination with Handbrake. Editing, and double encoding 30-60min videos takes some 8h total.

Ok, hmm, wow that's pretty long, my use case is really more like a couple of ~15 minute videos, where my biggest concern is trimming and size reduction because as said 4GB for a 15 minutes Video is a bit hefty, especially if you like me have hundreds of them. 

 

I do think I should give resolve another try tho, but ya'll basically say its rendering / re encoding however you want to call it isn't ideal? well, the videos don't have to be "top notch", "good" would be good enough.

 

9 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

40kbps is a very low number

this is how it currently records 

 

So basically 40Mbps.

 

(I just omitted the last digits, thought it should be clear due to file sizes I mentioned but I see, my bad) 

 

9 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

Upscaling to 4K? Why you wanna do that

 

Well it's something I read is possible - while retaining the image quality, it would be very useful for youtube as the higher the resolution the better the bitrates they give you, currently my 1080p videos look more like 480i *after* uploading to youtube... 

 

12 hours ago, Sharif said:

My bad, thought you meant getting better at editing video in general.

 

If that's the case, honestly once you get the hang of resolve, you can fly through it pretty quickly.

No worries, yeah, it's really more a "quick and dirty" job I'm asking for simply to reduce the file sizes really, while retaining image quality as good as possible... which is obviously difficult, apparently. 

 

I give resolve another try yeah, still I should then use handbrake afterwards? 

 

And as what should I save my resolve videos then? it's really a bit unclear and confusing (which is really the main issue, all the editing is useless if idk how to save my videos without great quality loss) 

[LogicalDrm]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

It's in my sig, tried a bunch of programs including resolve on the Ryzen PC, but I use movie maker on my laptop as it's fast enough, 10 minutes video takes about 20 minutes to edit and *re encode*

You have enough encoding power to things go quickly. As it depends on video bitrate and how much effects, cuts and other stuff there is. If there's need for editing.

 

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok, hmm, wow that's pretty long, my use case is really more like a couple of ~15 minute videos, where my biggest concern is trimming and size reduction because as said 4GB for a 15 minutes Video is a bit hefty, especially if you like me have hundreds of them. 

Consider also thats from time I import videos to Resolve to time I'm ready to upload it. So its about videos length to encode 720p30 videos, and 1.5x videos length to encode 1080p60 stuff for my hardware. Which is some 6 years older than yours.

 

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

I do think I should give resolve another try tho, but ya'll basically say its rendering / re encoding however you want to call it isn't ideal? well, the videos don't have to be "top notch", "good" would be good enough.

I use pretty generic settings as I don't have massive experience. So Resolve does have presets you can use, same goes with Handbrake. I use modified preset on Resolve:

 

And then use either HQ or Fast presets in Handbrake. With some exceptions depending on original video quality and what I'm aiming with it. Usually I need to do second encode just to make uploading to YT bit easier.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

I use pretty generic settings as I don't have massive experience. So Resolve does have presets you can use, same goes with Handbrake. I use modified preset on Resolve:

 

And then use either HQ or Fast presets in Handbrake. With some exceptions depending on original video quality and what I'm aiming with it. Usually I need to do second encode just to make uploading to YT bit easier.

ok, thanks I'll give this another try when I have time soon. I really need to reduce the size of my videos, and I don't want to just delete them either, most of them anyway.