GoPro and other cams in flight

[STOVLer]

Look five posts back for the video of the supremely intense det that may get our gopros taken away.

Sorry for not being painfully obvious, but I watched that video five posts back and meant that there is ANOTHER GoPro video from that det out there somewhere that I would love to see. And they won't be taken away anytime soon, because said video has probably the most awesome cockpit footage ever.

 

[usmarinemike]

Sorry for not being painfully obvious, but I watched that video five posts back and meant that there is ANOTHER GoPro video from that det out there somewhere that I would love to see. And they won't be taken away anytime soon, because said video has probably the most awesome cockpit footage ever.

Let it simmer. Everybody will probably see it eventually. Btw, there's no money shot...sorry.

 

[wink]

I must have missed the answer to crowbar's question about editing software. My son has a go pro and is collecting video from karting, autocross and flying. He tells me he can't edit anything worth a crap unless he has some pricey editing program. So what works well and what does it cost? Help me prevent him pulling one over on the old man.

 

[Brett327]

Wink, I do a lot of photo and video editing. I used the "Vegas" line for many years (they're owned by Sony now), but I switched to the Adobe stuff (Premiere and After Effects) a few years back. Vegas (and other platforms) are fine for cobbling together a cruise video, or YouTube clip, but the Adobe stuff is, IMO, head and shoulders above the others for a few reasons. First is workflow. Your ability to work natively with all the popular formats in Adobe without transcoding saves a lot of time. The same goes for ease of exporting. Moreover, the ability to seamlessly move an object between Premiere, After FX and Photoshop is huge. Finally, the Adobe line is the defacto industry standard. Just from a training point of view, you can find a YouTube tutorial on how to do just about anything on the Adobe line.

It does cost more, but there are probably student discounts available for your son. PM if you're interested in more info.

 

[Gatordev]

Wink, I do a lot of photo and video editing. I used the "Vegas" line for many years (they're owned by Sony now), but I switched to the Adobe stuff (Premiere and After Effects) a few years back. Vegas (and other platforms) are fine for cobbling together a cruise video, or YouTube clip, but the Adobe stuff is, IMO, head and shoulders above the others for a few reasons. First is workflow. Your ability to work natively with all the popular formats in Adobe without transcoding saves a lot of time. The same goes for ease of exporting. Moreover, the ability to seamlessly move an object between Premiere, After FX and Photoshop is huge. Finally, the Adobe line is the defacto industry standard. Just from a training point of view, you can find a YouTube tutorial on how to do just about anything on the Adobe line.

It does cost more, but there are probably student discounts available for your son. PM if you're interested in more info.

To be fair, Avid and FCP are also "industry standards," but that isn't the end all reason to get it.

That said, my good friend does this stuff for a living (I was also a production major, but have been out of the game for a long time), and he used to be a fan of Final Cut Pro, but now acknowledges that Adobe has pulled ahead, at least before the last round of updates for FCP X. He's also savvy on Avid (and I think he's still using FCP 9), but Adobe seems to be doing it fairly well at the moment, especially if you're not invested in any one "format" to date.

 

[Brett327]

Trust me, I lamented having to learn another platform (after using Vegas for nearly 10 years), but in the end, it was well worth the effort. Concur that Avid and FC are also accepted standards (Avid was the pro standard before the others came around), but those two are closer to Adobe than Vegas ever was. FWIW, I used a left hand jog wheel/controller which speeds up workflow immensely as well, but that's platform independent.

 

[phrogpilot73]

I used to use Adobe Premier, but the version I have is very old and doesn't play well with Windows 7. I am a huge fan of open source for a myriad of reasons and started looking for something new. I found a product called Lightworks that I'm very happy with, the learning curve is steep - but the price point is doable. Because it's an open source program, you get the huge open source community to back you up - they've also got tutorial videos on their website. You can get the free version to learn with, but if you want to export via more codecs (H.264/MP4 being the most noticeable), you have to pay $60/year (50% off for student discount). I use the free version and export in one of the native formats, then use Handbrake (another open source program) to convert to H.264.

Only one additional step, but it's FREE and while it's not the "industry standard" that Adobe Premier is - it's pretty popular in Hollywood. These are some of the movies that have been edited by Lightworks:

Braveheart, Moulin Rouge, Mission Impossible, Bruce Almighty, Gangs of New York, The Pelican Brief, Good Will Hunting, The Aviator, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Goodfellas, Jerry Maguire, ConAir, Batman Forever, and others...

 

[Gatordev]

Trust me, I lamented having to learn another platform (after using Vegas for nearly 10 years), but in the end, it was well worth the effort. Concur that Avid and FC are also accepted standards (Avid was the pro standard before the others came around), but those two are closer to Adobe than Vegas ever was. FWIW, I used a left hand jog wheel/controller which speeds up workflow immensely as well, but that's platform independent.

I haven't used Vegas in probably 10 years, but my biggest complaint with it (and many other "consumer" editors) at the time was that you couldn't apply the same theory to editing as you could when using tape. That mattered since I learned on tape. So instead of picking a part of scene and then copying it onto the Master (again, like tape), you were setting points on a video clip that then got rendered. Not that points (or EDL points) were foreign, but it took some adjustment to understand I had to adjust the points and not the actual playtime of the video clip. I know that's a little more prevalent now, but you can use either method in Adobe (or FCP). I'm probably not explaining that very well.

The jog wheel is the bomb. When I worked at a Pro-house (in the time of Betacam and/or SP, 3/4" tape, Time Base Correctors, etc), the Sony wheel had on-the-fly magnets depending on the speed or if you were doing variable speed. Not sure if that ever made it to the consumer level, but it was way cooler than the outer-wheel/inner-wheel design you would also see.

 

[Brett327]

I use this one:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/298670-REG/Contour_SPROV2_ShuttlePRO_v2.html

Best bang for buck. It has preset banks for just anout every NLE out there and is able to sense whether youre working between AE and Premiere and switch pesets on the fly. I'd recommend it to even the consumer/novice editors.

 

[Gatordev]

I know this is off topic from the original question, but I was talking to my buddy this morning and was asking a few questions about his current setup as a result of this thread. He's no slouch, and has edited professional since college (well, technically, he and I were hired in high school for a few small jobs, as well), doing both Pro-House stuff and now corporate Govt. contract stuff on Avid, FCP and Adobe.

Sure enough, he said he dropped FCP for Adobe CS6 and was mentioning that he's become lazy and ends up just scrubbing with the keyboard and mouse because it's easier. Apparently not quite as easy as Avid, but still pretty slick. Adobe has apparently really turned their software around and surprassed Apple in many ways (again, at least before the last FCP X update).

Not meant to argue anyone's point, just observing the non-linear landscape.

 

[Brett327]

The stuff they've dropped into CS6 has been pretty amazing. New PS, new ACR, the warp stabilizer alone makes the upgrade worth it. I've turned handheld footage or stuff I've shot in a moving vehicle into something that looks like it was shot on a dolly or jib.

OK, done gushing about Adobe. I'm starting to sound like Broadwell on Petraeus.

 

[Swanee]

I use the Corel stuff. It works well enough for slapping together my gopro footage.

 

[Gatordev]

I feel like a moron reading all of this stuff. I'm not trying to make the next Blair Witch Project, I just get sick of the hiccups and limited functions of WMM so I may give Lightworks a shot. "Informative" ratings for all my friends. Thanks.

I'd argue you could probably make a better movie than BWP with WMM. And if we couldn't make you feel like a moron, what's the point of the internet?

 

[phrogpilot73]

I feel like a moron reading all of this stuff. I'm not trying to make the next Blair Witch Project, I just get sick of the hiccups and limited functions of WMM so I may give Lightworks a shot. "Informative" ratings for all my friends. Thanks.

You'll feel like a moron the first several times you use Lightworks.

 

[wink]

OK, done gushing about Adobe. I'm starting to sound like Broadwell on Petraeus.

ha ha, Broadwell on Petraeus, ha ha ha