Monday, 30 July 2018

Video Editing


Wow, what a minefield of information there is out there about video editing and to top it off, as I want to shoot with a 360° camera but output standard 16:9 videos, this makes it more of a challenge to find the right software. There is this great youtube channel by Ben Claremont and I think he calls it something like "Life in 360". When I've been researching the different types of cameras currently available as well as the editing software required to make videos from 360° cameras, I keep coming across his videos and most of them are great. On Ben's website you are able to download sample footage from some of the different 360° cameras that he owns. He also has some tutorial videos on using some of the different video editing software out there. 
So far I think I've figured out that I want to use a GoPro Fusion to
record my footage (I'll go into detail in another post). Once I capture the footage, I then need to render that footage in the GoPro Fusion Studio software. Lots of people complain that the GoPro Fusion Studio software is hard to use and is very resource intensive on your PC. Thankfully, thanks to Ben's sample footage and the fact the GoPro software is free, I've been able to test it on my PC and it seems to work fine. Rendering a video does take a while though, it took 5 minutes to render a 30 second video. But it works well and pretty fast whilst editing the video and I can always let my PC render overnight or something. I guess the software might work slower with larger files but the largest sample I could get was only one minute long.
Once I've got what I want from the GoPro software, then ideally I open it in another piece of software that allows me to re-frame the shots, do the camera panning as well as add any text, special effects, voice over, additional audio or background music. The software that I would like to use to do all of that is Adobe After Effects or Adobe Premier Pro but at $30 a month for either of them I don't think that is viable at this time. 
The possible solution that I've found is that I first open the video in another piece of free software that is actually for a different camera. Insta360Studio will allow me to add the correct panning on the images to make it look like someone was there with me moving the camera around. After I've captured all the shots that I want I have to export them from Insta360Studio and import them into the last piece of software to do the text and audio components. There is some pretty decent software out there for free for this last part and it may just do the stuff that I need Insta360Studio to do but I can't find any definitive answer on that part yet. DaVinci Resolve seems to be the pick of the free software so I think I'll give that a go first. 
One more thing ticked off the list, I have a software solution that I'm happy with for the moment and even though it's three different pieces of software, it's all free. Shame the camera is going to be a little more expensive than I'd like.

Bomber.

No comments:

Post a Comment