Video editing

[woodacre1983]

Evening Gents

My new business now requires the daunting task of social media. And more to the point social media videos.

I have lucky enough to have a good camera set up that will allow me to do the vlog style short videos i need to

But I am stuck on a computer/mac/ipad for the basic editing.

What are the requirements? what are the ones to look at?


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[A440]

I use iMovie (free with mac) on a 10 year old iMac for editing simple videos and it works very well. Any new Mac will do just fine as the M chips are incredibly powerful. iMovie is a great app imho.

If you need a more sophisticated app then there is Final Cut Pro, but I've never felt the need to get it.

[woodacre1983]

I use iMovie (free with mac) on a 10 year old iMac for editing simple videos and it works very well. Any new Mac will do just fine as the M chips are incredibly powerful. iMovie is a great app imho.

If you need a more sophisticated app then there is Final Cut Pro, but I've never felt the need to get it.

So i am looking for a Mac really? rather than an Ipad?


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[A440]

So i am looking for a Mac really? rather than an Ipad?


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I'm afraid I don't know much about iPads...prefer the Macs.

[chrisparker]

The software isn’t your biggest issue, it’s connectivity. iPads lack ports. A MacBook Pro would be preferable so you can have the computer plugged in, and camera or card reader. Pro’s also have an additional card slot which you can add additional storage. Video files can eat disk space.

[sickie]

You can get I movie on an iPhone so I guess iPad would do just fine.


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[Lammylee]

LumaFusion on iPad is very good for editing I’ve done a few videos and once you learn the features it’s easy to use. One off payment, no subscription.

An example of one of my efforts below-

https://youtu.be/Rk7YyAsxMNA?si=w5ktittUbCB7OTjg

[joe narvey]

LumaFusion on iPad is very good for editing I’ve done a few videos and once you learn the features it’s easy to use. One off payment, no subscription.

An example of one of my efforts below-

https://youtu.be/Rk7YyAsxMNA?si=w5ktittUbCB7OTjg

At the begging of this short video I expected to see a Daleks in formation moving across the yard. No idea if its the location or style of filming.

[Darkeeboy]

DaVinci resolve gets good reviews and is free


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[NikGixer750]

“In shot” is a decent app, easy to use and has nice features


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[Mr.D]

Resolve is a hugely capable package and free .
Its complex though.

[Itsguy]

As a pro at this, I’d suggest that you could just about edit simple stuff on an iPad Pro with an external SSD, but only if it’s pretty basic. You can run a version of FCPX on one, and even DaVinci Resolve, so it’s theoretically possible. But for serious work you’ll want a proper keyboard, and while you can work on a laptop, you’ll soon find the screen feels cramped. You could try iMovie, but it’s very limited compared to FCPX. Many editors use Adobe Premiere, though personally I find it clunky, outdated and slow. DaVinci Resolve is serious software, and if you stick to the edit and deliver pages you might be ok.

I should warn you that anything above the basic iMovie / iPad FCPX type program is going to be a serious learning curve. FCPX may look approachable, but to get any good at it will require some study - I’d suggest watching an online course. As for Resolve, people are paid very good money for being good at that, it’s a career. When I hear people say, ‘I’d like to have a go at grading in Resolve’, what I hear is something like, ‘I’d like to have a go at playing the violin’, or ‘I’m planning to take up tennis and hope to play at Wimbledon next year’. But social videos should certainly be achievable.

I should also warn you that you’re walking into a colour management nightmare. If something looks good on an iPad, then it’s arguably fine, but it will look completely different on a Mac desktop, and different again on a PC. You can’t actually trust the viewer in Resolve, unless you create a custom setting for the screen. You can use FCPX on a desktop or laptop with the display in Rec.709 mode, and it then will match the iPad and TV, but for the most insane reason - the display mode is playing the video wrongly to cancel out the way QuickTime is playing it wrongly. And don’t expect the video to look the same on YouTube when you switch back to a standard mode. At least you don’t have to worry about this stuff on an iPad as it’s arguably ‘right’, though not the same as PCs. There is literally no way to manage the colour of online video, and all professional colourists will just tell you that it looked ok on their screen, and after that it’s not their problem. Good luck!

PS - since your question was mainly about hardware, I’d suggest a (Apple silicon) MacBook Pro as a minimum, but you’d probably do better with a fast iMac or Mac Studio plus Studio Display, and budget for a few TB of external SSDs.

[Mr.D]

On the colour management front :

If you stick to additive offset grading in RGB and leave gamma and HSI alone you should be ok broadly soeaking , don’t expect your colours to be an exact match monitor to monitor and platform to platform . I’m assuming you are shooting rec.709 and outputting rec.709 at the end. I personally would shoot raw and ingest as an Aces linear colorspace (2065 probably) grade and conform in Aces and then convert to rec.709 but my main deliverable target isn’t rec.709 . That’s just so people can see previews on consumer kit like laptops /ipads . Going this route is pro territory though and whilst not as mystifying as some woukd suggest you’d need to understand the fundamentals of imaging colour science to get your head around it .

Stick with at least 10bit for your end conform . Don’t use 8bit , shoot 10bit or higher . Again I’d personally shoot raw or log prores at a pinch .

Calibrating displays is a whole topic itself as complex as editing but you’ll find most modern displays are actually not bad for rec.709 out of the box ( within delta 4 mostly) . I reccomend the belle nuit test pattern as a good setup target for contrast and brightness . Forget about profiling and calibrating your display beyond that unless you are wanting to do pro level stuff.

[Mr.D]

https://www.belle-nuit.com/test-chart

This also gives you a good idea about “legal” video levels . I doubt youtube is that fussy and probably defaults and even converts to an sRGB OC level standard with 0 black and 254 ( 8bit code values) but I could be wrong .

If you do generate video legal rec.709 bear in mind everything below 16 is clipped to black and above 235 is clipped to white with a subsequent remap to the curve in between . This will break your images and induce posterisation if you master to 8bit , master to 10bit for this reason if no other .

[Itsguy]

https://www.belle-nuit.com/test-chart

This also gives you a good idea about “legal” video levels . I doubt youtube is that fussy and probably defaults and even converts to an sRGB OC level standard with 0 black and 254 ( 8bit code values) but I could be wrong .

If you do generate video legal rec.709 bear in mind everything below 16 is clipped to black and above 235 is clipped to white with a subsequent remap to the curve in between . This will break your images and induce posterisation if you master to 8bit , master to 10bit for this reason if no other .

This isn’t really the issue, it’s more that iPads, iPhone, and televisions use Rec.2020 or what have you (expect with a P3 colour gamut), basically they work like TV, while PCs and some phones use sRGB meaning the shadow levels look completely different, and things graded on an iMac in P3 could end up looking like anything on another device. Not only that, but QuickTime has a colour space tagging system that is set up with an incorrect gamma for 1-1-1 encoded files that should be Rec.709, playing them far too bright with milky shadows. This flawed system is completely ignored by PCs, as well as YouTube and Vimeo which tag everything 1-1-1 regardless of what it originally was (unless it’s HDR). Even different web browsers will play things differently. So the whole thing is a compete and utter mess, and there’s no way to control colour online. At all. It’s also quite hard to correctly set up a Mac to conform to any standard unless you really know what you’re doing, or it’s an iPad. But this is probably beyond the scope of this thread!

[Mr.D]

This isn’t really the issue, it’s more that iPads, iPhone, and televisions use Rec.2020 or what have you (expect with a P3 colour gamut), basically they work like TV, while PCs and some phones use sRGB meaning the shadow levels look completely different, and things graded on an iMac in P3 could end up looking like anything on another device. Not only that, but QuickTime has a colour space tagging system that is set up with an incorrect gamma for 1-1-1 encoded files that should be Rec.709, playing them far too bright with milky shadows. This flawed system is completely ignored by PCs, as well as YouTube and Vimeo which tag everything 1-1-1 regardless of what it originally was (unless it’s HDR). Even different web browsers will play things differently. So the whole thing is a compete and utter mess, and there’s no way to control colour online. At all. It’s also quite hard to correctly set up a Mac to conform to any standard unless you really know what you’re doing, or it’s an iPad. But this is probably beyond the scope of this thread!

The probematic levels flag on QTs is to convert video levels to PC level rather than a gamma change ; which is what I mentioned previously. Its pretty easy to circumvent by using correct levels in the first place and I haven’t seen it as an issue since the days of SD mpeg2 formats about 27years ago and I only encountered it when I had to make test patterns to vet video rushes pipelines. All about the metadata.

[Mj2k]

So who do I believe in posts that seem to have gone way into willy waving territory vs helping the OP?

[Mr.D]

So who do I believe in posts that seem to have gone way into willy waving territory vs helping the OP?

It does . You just don’t understand any of it .

[Itsguy]

So who do I believe in posts that seem to have gone way into willy waving territory vs helping the OP?

Agreed it’s unhelpful, the OP should just buy an Apple silicon Mac Studio and Studio Display or a fast iMac and get to it ;-)

Never found macs to have 1.98 gamma , closer to 2.2. I always regarded the mac gamma dtp thing as a myth. Not had any issues with resolve on a 15 and 16 macbook pro. Never had any issues with gamma flags on mac workstations either from at least 2 decades ago . And I was calibrating them in terms of gamma and grayscale to 2.35 and D.65 sRGB for motion picture work. At one point we used a hardware gammaof 1.7 gamma for log film scans on sgi cineon workstations as it was the inverse of 0.6 ( print film I think) but that very quickly got superceded by using hardware display luts to get you to a better resukt on a 2.2/2.4 crt .

The pc to video levels thing was an issue and I often had to explain to supposedly experienced people that my video legal QTs were lifted on their PC because their display was expecting 0-254 instead of 16-235 . I unfortunately embarassed someone in front of the bbc tech check for “7 wonders of the solar system” because I refused to put out 8bit PC level material for a broadcast show and stuck with using 10bit video legal broadcast range as my rendering intent . At the QC my stuff passed with flying colours ( Mars and Saturn I seem to remember) with the colorist complimenting me as it was rare for him to get spot on levels whilst matey boys was crushed and clipped and when the colorist did his best to remap it it kicked up posterisation as he’d on my rendered 8but ; zero colour management on his side .

I used to recommend log 10bit delivery even for broadcast shows because that way they can grade it all over the shop. I think the beeb took my advice on that for a couple of SD shows ; also insisted we ingested and worked ungraded log square pixel 1024x576 with some super16 shot shows rather than take 10bit 720x576 graded video. Outputting proper accurate legal video is more of a pain than just letting the colorist grade the log to whatever they want.

Its actually a lot simpler now even though its higher quality. Getting back to the topic Resolve is definitely my weapon of choice for sorting out weird colorspace issues ( like Phantom and drone cameras with barely comprehensible colorspaces) you can sort out anything in Resolve but there is a fairly steep learning curve for an experienced person let alone a novice .

My last comment on this - if you are targeting motion picture work you should be fine. The issue is something you will run into if you need to deliver for eg YouTube, and is to do with quicktime’s ColorSync tagging, and not the system gamma. Here you can take the blue pill and continue to believe everything is fine, or you can take the red pill and look up Resolve’s Rec.709-A gamma and ask yourself why it exists - welcome to a world of pain!

Edit - ok one more comment just to explain this very tricky topic for anyone who actually cares, this video more or less lays out the issue, but they are much too kind to Apple who simply used the wrong gamma for Rec.709 in ColorSync.


1.961 (sorry I said 1.98 earlier) is actually an encoding spec for Rec.709 for use in cameras, and not a decoding spec, however the decoding spec was never properly defined in the Rec.709 white paper anyway. Apple may have used it due to their transition from 1.8 to 2.2 many years ago as it’s roughly half way in between, and some claim it’s intentional, because you may be watching the video in a bright office and actually want to have the brightness cranked up, but 1.96 is surely overkill. This argument is unconvincing anyway, as iOS doesn’t do that, it just works properly and everything looks great. The proposed solutions in the video don’t quite work either as there is no real solution currently, it’s actually not possible to create a file for YouTube that looks the same on MacOS, iOS, and PCs, it will always look wrong somewhere, though the suggestion of targeting 2.2 isn’t terrible, it’s just an oversimplification of an unsolvable problem. They are right to hope that Apple one day changes MacOS Colorsync to match iOS and decode 1-1-1 tagged Rec.709 files in a standard way. To this we could add that YouTube and Vimeo could preserve ColorSync tags instead of changing them all to 1-1-1, and PCs could try actually reading them, this would solve everything.

I’m afraid this is the world you are wading into when thinking you’re going to buy a Mac and start making social video content. However the casual user may not even notice, beyond thinking your video looks a bit different on another device, and the viewers in the software aren’t quite reliable for some reason, but so what. However if you’ve slaved over a beautiful grade and actually start to ask yourself why it looks wrong on some devices and how to solve it, that’s when you open Pandora’s box.

[Tokyo Tokei]

Gently moving back to the question about what pc/mac/ipad might be best, I'd suggest it depends on what exactly the "social media" posts are, and how long (ie, quick clips or long form Youtube videos)

That's because a.) longer videos take a lot more disk space and b.) video encoding tends to take some time (the bit where you hit "export as...")

So if it is just short clips, it's not going to make much difference what you use. It won't need much disk space and won't take much time to export. An iPad (or even an iPhone, yes you can and I have edited Youtube clips with iMovie on an iPhone...) would work. The modern ones use USB-C and you can attach external storage if you really want to.

But a desktop or laptop with a decent screen, mouse (or trackpad) and some good storage is going to make everything a lot easier to manage. If you are intending to create longer videos then a MacbookPro will be better than a Macbook or iPad, as it uses active cooling (basically, an exciting technology called a "fan"...) so it can chug along at full cpu power for longer without throttling. If you go this route, external SSD storage is going to be a lot cheaper than adding internal storage, as Apple charges a crazy amount for this. Whatver you plump for, a bigger screen is always helpful, but try to avoid the really cheap ones.

Apple's iMacs have superb screens (often overlooked...) and any of them would make a fine editing workstation with some external storage. For more money you could get a Macbook Pro, Mac Mini or Mac Studio and your choice of display.

Finally, there's some interesting info re colour spaces in this thread but (and with all respect to the posters, who are sharing good knowledge) I wouldn't get too hung up on it. I used to hang out with an American who had graded footage for customers including Tony Scott. His pro work was widely respected but his social media posts were uploaded straight from his iphone.

Good content, an interesting thumbnail and (not mentioned yet, but I think important) good sound quality are where to start.

As for software, I've used lots on PCs and Macs and basically pick one you get on with and learn it. iMovie isn't a bad place to start, really, and is free with any Apple device. Hope some of this helps.