Editing software

All video editing software fits into two groups, and each group fundamentally affects what you can do with it:

Linear editors
Back in the day, when people edited by chopping and gluing tape together, you started at the beginning and worked through in sequence to the end… this is linear editing. On the computer, linear editors have one timeline – you import your music, and when you put your clip onto the timeline, it goes to the start of the music. The next clip goes straight after it and so on, until you reach the end. If you delete a clip, all the clips after it get moved up so you’re not left with a gap. Linear editors are simple to use, but you’ll find it hard to be precise.

Examples of linear editors: Windows Movie Maker

Non-linear editors
These programs have multiple timelines, and you can put your clips anywhere on the timeline and move them around as you want. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but non-linear editors have huge benefits when you get the hang of them: you can edit key scenes first, then fill in the blanks around them. You can match chunks of your video perfectly with the music and changing other clips on the timeline won’t interfere with them. You can also stack video clips on top of each other so that they play at the same time, which is the basis for a lot of special effects such as split screens and overlays (e.g. watermarks).

Examples of non-linear editors: Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, AVID, Final Cut Pro

Which one should I choose?
If you’re just starting out, my advice would be to start simple and start cheap – use whatever you have on your system at the moment so that you can learn the basics and then be more informed about moving onto one of the more expensive programs. I started on Windows Movie Maker and made about 5 or 6 vids before I started playing with Adobe Premiere – I’m now a huge fan of Adobe, but would have found its complexity too daunting if I’d tried to use it when I was a complete newbie. Adobe, Avid and FCP are all used for professional productions, so they have the options to match, and often assume you have some knowledge already.

The majority of vidders use Sony Vegas, as it has an intuitive interface that’s a little more user-friendly than many other heavyweight programs. It is much more powerful than the basic, free editors. As an example, I use Adobe After Effects alongside Premiere Pro so that I can use its advanced masking and 3D tools – Vegas combines both, albeit with nowhere near the same capability.

One huge plus for Adobe is the integration between the different adobe programs – you can create multi-layer PSD files in photoshop and then import them into Premiere or After Effects, preserving all the layers. This is a great tool for adding overlays and manipulating your original footage, plus the user interface of Premiere and After Effects will seem fairly familiar to someone well-versed in Photoshop. In particular, After Effects is basically the Photoshop equivalent for video, and contains many of the same tools, such as paintbrushes, clone tools, vector masks and so on.

Whichever one you choose, stick with it! If you’re new to fanvids, the whole thing will seem quite daunting. Don’t be too ambitious for your first project – just aim to find your way around the basics, and from there, you can start to learn about each tool and what it can do – work on getting the basics now, and you can spend years building on that knowledge!

You may need further software to prepare your source files and encode your final video, so I’ll look at these in the next tutorials…