I have a Macbook Air with iMovie, and iMovie works fine for what I need - very basic editing and organization of video files shot with my Nikon D7000 or my iPhone. With iMovie, I can easily make the videos I need to make.
The thing is, my primary computer is a PC. I have been a desktop PC ‘power user’ for my entire adult life. I’m currently running Windows 7. The video editing program that I have - Adobe Premier Elements 10 - runs like an absolute PIG on this computer. So I try to avoid using it.
I’d like a simpler and higher-performance editing program for PC. I know that I can always plug my Macbook into my desktop monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and just use it as I do the PC. But all my photos and audio are on my PC. I’d really just prefer to do it on the PC.
Is there a program that anyone would recommend? Ideally, it would be free, or as inexpensive as possible. Thank you.
I had a need to do some video stuff on my PC that I’d previously always done with Windows Movie Maker. It’s no longer available for Windows 10…well, no, I guess it is…here. But the reviews don’t give me hope, and I swear it wasn’t available last August when I was searching for it.
Anyway, in my search to find a suitable replacement - really one that wasn’t too complicated - I settled on Wondershare Filmora which was “only” $60 (which could be high or low for what you need, not sure) and that suited me.
I used it for the thing I needed to make, which was a slideshow with transitions and sounds. I was happy to find out later that it could work as a screen recorder, when I needed to make a video for someone of how to do something on their machine. It actually is quite feature-rich…I just don’t know how to use video features.
Really though, after a lot of searching, it seemed to be the only one that would easily let me make a slideshow.
Another $60 vote for Wondershare Filmora. Been using it for just over a year for my home projects. Easy to learn and lots of (mostly free) additional features/add-ons available.
I’ve treid Shotcuta couple of times. Takes a bit of getting used to after Windows Movie Maker disappeared in one or other update, but it seems to do more or less the same sort of job. Eventually.
If you’re going to pay $60, I’d get a copy of Vegas Movie Studio. It’s just a stripped down of the full-capability professional Vegas software. I wouldn’t buy a no-name product like “Wondershare”. Plus the low-end Vegas is only $50, so it’s cheaper.
The question is whether that fits your “easy to use” criteria-- I think it is, but I’m really used to it, so probably not the best judge. They have a free trial.
If Premiere is murdering your PC, you’re probably in trouble. The lightest weight editor is avidemux, but it’s complicated to use beyond simple cutting and joining. If you’re looking for more than that, probably best to stick with Premiere and see if you can do anything to boost it’s performance.
If you’re patient, Vegas Movie Studio is frequently on the Humble Bundle deal site (14 instead of 15, but whatever.) That’s where I got it for $10 or something. It’s much easier to use than avidemux.
DaVinci seemed too good to be true and it was. I couldn’t even get the goddamn program running, it gave me an error message that I had “no CUDA-enabled GPUs”, whatever the hell that means.
Trying ShotCut now. Wondering what the catch is gonna be. It also looks “too good to be free.” In my experience, if something seems to good to be free, there is some kind of catch. I mean, hell, I already HAVE a program to use: iMovie. But there’s one annoying problem with it aside from needing to use my laptop rather than my desktop computer - it seemingly forces the video clips to snap to the beginning of the project. It doesn’t just let you place clips where you want them, it FORCIBLY jams them together. I think this is bullshit, but maybe there’s some way to disable it that I’m just not aware of.
I’ve used both of these (I switched to Resolve when I had trouble moving my licence of PowerDirector to my new machine) - they’re both very good, but will both struggle to run very well on an older machine.
It did have that, up to a fairly recent version change - I remember trying out v12 or somewhere around that level on an older machine with no GPU and it ran (albeit not very fast both in the interface and the rendering)
The D7000 shoots 1080p H264, the iPhone (depending on which one) can shoot 4k H264 or H265/HEVC. Those codecs are drastically different and have major implications on the editing hardware and software.
Almost any PC or editing app can smoothly edit 1080p H264. Almost no PC, Mac or editing app can edit 4k H264 with total smoothness, much less HEVC – unless you use proxies which are lower-res interim versions of the camera files. Premiere Pro as of two years ago supports proxies and FCPX has always supported those.
iMovie uses Intel’s Quick Sync encode/decode hardware acceleration when editing H264 material. This is probably why your MacBook Air seems so fast. Premiere Elements doesn’t support this and Premiere Pro only started supporting this a few months ago, and only for encode (ie exporting) not decode (ie editing). This means Premiere Pro can export to H264 fast but editing on a 4k H264 timeline (which requires decoding) is no faster than before. This is less a factor for 1080p but it’s vital for 4k H264.
No matter how powerful the GPU they don’t help much on editing H264 or H265, since the core algorithm of those is inherently sequential. A GPU can accelerate effects but not encode or decode of “long GOP” codecs. The only exception is both AMD and nVidia bundle on their GPUs totally separate video transcoding logic, which if used by both OS and app can accelerate H264/H265 operations. AMD’s is called UVD/VCE and nVidia’s is called NVDEC/NVENC. The only platform I’m aware of which uses UVD/VCE is FCPX on the iMac Pro. Apple uses that since the Xeon CPU doesn’t have Quick Sync.
There are various free video editing apps for Windows. I don’t know which, if any, support Quick Sync, proxies, or the AMD/nVidia proprietary transcoding hardware acceleration. Again, this is not generally lan issue for 1080p but for 4k H264 it’s important.
For Windows, Movie Maker 7 was formerly available but it’s no longer supported and has security vulnerabilities. I’ve heard conflicting reports about the status of Movie Maker on Windows 10.
There are also various free video editing apps for Windows which will work on Windows 7 or 10. I don’t know what the editing vs encoding performance is of each one.