Which software do I need to get to make this specific video?

[LDS]

Hi, I've made an account on this forum to ask one specific thing, though it's quite a long-winded thing

I haven't made any Youtube videos since Windows Movie Maker stopped being a feature of Windows, so we're talking nearly a decade ago.

I made some pretty cool videos with WMM and was a fairly repsectable 'tuber in my day, and generally enjoyed pushing the boundaries of what WMM was capable of. However, even if I found an old 2012 version to download I don't think that package could make the video I want to make today.

I haven't had a burning desire to make a video for years & my fear of the new/sense of intimidation at the wealth of video making software out there has always stopped me in my tracks quite soon after any initial envisioning of any project I'd like to create.

However, my current video is already completed in my mind and just needs putting together on a software editor, and I'm now, once again, faced with trying to figure out if I need to buy a good video making package (but I might not get an urge to make another video after this one for a long time) or whether I can do what I want to do with a free or very cheap package that can just carry me over this one project.

And I try googling and, of course, none of the hype for each package has anything to do with the features I require. Or, at least, I can't convert video-making terminology language into the things I have imagined for my video, what the technical terms are for the techniques I want to use.

So here goes in trying to describe what I need the package to do:

On my completed video I want the screen to be split into three sections, for the entire duration of the video, which will be anything up to 10 hours long. Certainly not less than two hours.

I want one quarter of the screen, horizontally at the bottom of the screen, to be a black space that contains nothing but continuously changing subtitles.

The remaining three quarters of the screen I want to be split exactly in two, vertically.

In the left-hand half of this split I want to have pictures continually fading in and out.

In the right hand half of this split I want to have continuously playing video.

I also want to put continuously changing text over both the pictures and video.

On top of this, I want to place a soundtrack on the whole video, but be able to fade the music out smoothly, when required, in order to then have the soundtrack of the split-screen video play for a bit before fading the regular soundtrack back in. I want the split-screen video to be either quiet or silent while the soundtrack plays. Preferably a software package that lets me adjust the volumes of the two sound streams manually and smoothly.

Similar to [just the contents of the square, the rest of the image is garbage resulting from not knowing the geometric terminology for the required image]:



But the lower box thinner by half.

Now, as I say, I could do a lot with WMM, but I never got this advanced if WMM could even do something like this.

I also like the sound of the hype of some packages which say they can manipulate videos to fit whatever size you want. Improve the grading. Etc.

But I'm happy to work with something that will just let me complete the project in the most basic way if it's possible via a cheap or free package. I'm personally not fussed if the video section is slightly rough round the edges.

So... anyone out there able to empathise with what I'm on about? Know where I'm coming from? Can visualise what I'm on about? AND be able to recommend me something?

Any help greatly appreciated.

[johnmeyer]

Vegas can do this using track motion. I just spent one minute on this and have attached a photo which shows the result. It is probably not exactly what you wanted, and I didn't spend any time to get the three boxes the right size, but I think you get the idea. It has text at the bottom, a video in the upper right, and a photo in the upper left.

I used Vegas Pro to do this. It is expensive. However, I'm pretty sure that Vegas Moviemaker can do the same thing. If you shop around and get an older version (on eBay, as an example) you can get it for very little money. Even if you buy the latest version direct from Magix, I think you can get it for under $50.

[super8rescue]

for free, davinci resolve, if you have at least an i7 computer and only want basic editing.

8gb ram will do 1080p, anything higher than that, 16gb min.

You won't be able to do motion graphics in DV Resolve with 8gb ram but edits/exports will be fine.

So many tutorials on you tube to explain what you specifically need to achieve in the edit with DV Resolve.

I couldn't live without DV resolve.

Audio in DVR is a lot of fun.

[Alwyn]

This is a pretty straight-forward Picture in Picture scenario. Magix Movie Edit Pro could do this easily. A hard core of helpful users over at the forum, too!

[LDS]

Thanks for the excellent quick replies.

Especially thanks to johnmeyer for showing it in pictures and going to the effort to show it in action.

The free'ness of Davinci is certainly appealing, but I do remember WMM crashing like a MoFo all the time back in the day & the word 'crash' is therefor a word I take particular notice in when reading about the product. I can bare it, I just would rather not.

Both Vegas Movie Studio and Magix Movie Edit Pro are therefor the two that are left in my decision pool. Hmm, should I flip a coin?

Flipped: Magix wins out, so I'll try that one first.

Much obliged & I'll report back if I get on with or if I don't some time in the future.

Thanks again you marvellous people!

[Alwyn]

Re MEP: Magix has just released a new version which has pretty hefty hardware requirements: check the required specs carefully eg Intel iGPU required for quick rendering, separate modern graphics card for smooth previewing during editing.

Here's my go; took me 30 minutes.

[johnmeyer]

Nice job, Alwyn!

[Alwyn]

Thanks John.

You don't realise what's involved in this stuff until you try it; LDS is going to be there for HOURS inserting the images! 6 seconds each for 2 hours?! Gasp!

[johnmeyer]

Thanks John.

You don't realise what's involved in this stuff until you try it; LDS is going to be there for HOURS inserting the images! 6 seconds each for 2 hours?! Gasp!

I'm not sure what you mean. One great thing about Vegas is how quickly you can insert and manipulate photos. You simply select all the photos in a folder and drag them to the timeline. If you've set an overlap in Preferences, all the photos will overlap using the default transition. You can then set pan/crop to "match output aspect" and all the photos will be cropped so they fill the screen (if that's what you want). The Vegas "track motion" only needs to be set once for all those photos in order to put them in the upper left corner (same for the titles at the bottom and the video in the upper right corner).

[Alwyn]

All my aeroplane pics were oddball shapes so I had to crop each one individually. With "standard" pics I applied the Size and Position details to them all at once. I'll have to see if I can automatically crop the oddball ones, as you can do in Vegas.

[LDS]

Thanks John.

You don't realise what's involved in this stuff until you try it; LDS is going to be there for HOURS inserting the images! 6 seconds each for 2 hours?! Gasp!

You ain't kiddin'

It's taken me this entire month to make this video.

Anyway, I said I'd let you know how I got on when I'd finished, so I hope you don't think I'm just promoting my vid here, but here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoHRh68cUaE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoHRh68cUaE

I'm hopefully going to be deleting this one relatively soon though, as it's only 98% complete, but I can only take the vid so far by myself, full explanation is in my pinned comment.

Hey, if you like snooker, even better, hope you love it as much as I did, heck I had to watch it a gazillion times but I'm not sick of it yet!

[LDS]

Thanks John.

You don't realise what's involved in this stuff until you try it; LDS is going to be there for HOURS inserting the images! 6 seconds each for 2 hours?! Gasp!

I'm not sure what you mean. One great thing about Vegas is how quickly you can insert and manipulate photos. You simply select all the photos in a folder and drag them to the timeline. If you've set an overlap in Preferences, all the photos will overlap using the default transition. You can then set pan/crop to "match output aspect" and all the photos will be cropped so they fill the screen (if that's what you want). The Vegas "track motion" only needs to be set once for all those photos in order to put them in the upper left corner (same for the titles at the bottom and the video in the upper right corner).

The time involved wasn't really in adding the photos but in arranging them into individual lengths and aligning them with the video (as you can see from the video), all the photos are of different sizes and would have to be that way, no automation of sizing was either possible or wanted.

In the end I decided not to make the upper left box its own box but instead put the photos onto unique pages with unique text as I felt this would make future editing of individual pages easier. I have no idea if this is the case or not, but this would be an area where your method could well be more efficient than what I ended up doing.

[johnmeyer]

While I realize that it takes a LONG time the first time you do something, it should not take more than a day or so to do a slide show. I've done over 100 slide shows, all of them in Vegas. A decade ago I had a "job" of providing a DVD for the graduation high school seniors where they each gave me 30-40 photos (and sometimes videos) and I turned these into twelve 4-10 minute music videos. Here's a link to one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHgBz0TSask

As you can see, I did a lot more than just do the Ken Burns pan/zoom effect (note the animations within the frame, as one example) and yet was able to finish each of these in just a few hours. One key is to add the photos, as I already describe in my last post, so that they all overlap and they all have "match aspect ratio" applied. I also add a keyframe to the beginning and end of each event, and then use Paste Event Attributes, to copy that to all events. I do this even though I am going to customize each event because it saves time doing that part of the operation over and over.

There are dozens of other things you can do to simplify and speed the process, without compromising your "artistic" effort.

P.S. I normally do NOT use goofy transitions and instead do 95% of my work just using cuts and crossfades, but I decided that there were too many photos and not enough story and therefore the transitions could make it more entertaining, but without making it look totally schlocky.

[LDS]

Lol. I appreciate your efforts and immense help with this thread, but what you're talking about is a few hours per 30-40 pics, and just pics. I don't know if you've watched my vid as a reference for conversation, but my vid has hundreds of pics, so, obviously, it's going to take several few hours And pics are only one small aspect of it

The act of inserting the pics onto a timeline once they are ready isn't really the main time sink, although it certainly takes time

But really, although I'm laughing, I hope you don't take that to mean I'm laughing at the help, as I'm certainly not, it's just a bit confusing when people talk about different things because of the way threads develop.

No matter what method you use, adding pics to a timeline takes time, whether automated or manual, how much time that is will depend on the task at hand and whether it's "a lot" of time depends on one's interpretation of lots of time.

For my project, the time involved in pics was primarily finding them in the first place, you were just given them, one crucial difference here, I then required individual text to be associated with each and every pic, this takes a lot of time, certainly more time than just adding pics as the be-all-and-end-all, the act of me then adding these pics to the timeline was then 'relatively' a short time, compared to the weeks in preparation, so whether it was 2 hours or one hour adding the pics to the timeline is 'relatively' irellevant to a month-long project

But I get what you're saying.

[Alwyn]

LDS, that's amazing. Massive amount of work there. You obviously love the topic of snooker to persevere with such a project for so long. I think my interest would have started waning well before the month was out! Well done.

What software did you use in the end?

I normally do NOT use goofy transitions and instead do 95% of my work just using cuts and crossfades

Glad to hear it! I'm finishing off a 110 slide show (10 minutes) and I have only used 10-frame crossfades and every third image has a slight Ken Burns. Looks good, IMO. No Death By Transition for me.

[LDS]

Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium. Cost £120 or near enough ($155 or 133Euros). I started with the basic package at £60, but, of course, it didn't have screen capture unless you upgraded...

It was ok. I had a few issues with it, but it only crashed once throughout the entire project which was good.

The most irritating thing was it kept auto-saving, or otherwise stopping to think every now and then. Every time it did this one of my fades, for example, would be halfway onto the timeline and then suddenly, post-thinking-time, it had vanished and been dumped wherever it was at the exact moment the think-time kicked in. Looking back I would have turned off autosaves, assuming you can.

Also, the nodes that are used to manipulate sound volumes of audio and video clips are an exercise in the worst possible form of pixel hunting. Working the sound curve was like doing minute pixel shading in Microsoft Paint but without being able to zoom-in. Or if you did zoom in, everything else got shrunk, which was equally unhelpful.

And some other minor stuff. But all-in-all, I generally enjoyed working with it and it didn't hinder me any step of the way in what I wanted to do.

[Alwyn]

The most irritating thing was it kept auto-saving

Agree, that "feature"/cursor-stealing really is a pain. I'll send Support a note about it.

the nodes that are used to manipulate sound volumes of audio and video clips are an exercise in the worst possible form of pixel hunting.

Not the easiest thing to do, I must admit! A magnifying glass helps.

Glad it generally worked out OK for you.