Free or cheap editing software for iMac?

F

firehawk

Veteran
I'm trying to help someone get up and running for some simple editing.
What free or cheap software would you recommend?
They have a 2013 iMac with 8GM RAM, 3.2Ghz i5, GeForce GT 755 1024MB running OS 10.10.5

I'm considering HitFilm Express
https://fxhome.com/express
but will need to update the OS to at least 10.11

The camera is Sony FDR AX53 and will likely record in either
1920 x 1080p at 24/30/60 fps (60 Mb/s XAVC S)
or
1920 x 1080p at 60 fps (28 Mb/s AVCHD)

Also what photo software would you recommend for opening and cropping pdf?

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EDIT
They also want me to teach them. I'm pretty good in Premiere (windows) and have Vegas Pro, but very poor at Mac so I will have to learn & transition.

I have an old CS4 Master Collection (Mac) I don't use anymore. I considered giving that to them. It should be able to handle AVCHD but maybe not 60P?
And I have Final Cut Studio 3 I don't use anymore, but it would be a hassel to transcode I bet
 
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If doable, I would ask the person to bring over both types of footage (XAVC-S and AVCHD - shot at 24p and 60p) and sit down together and try both pieces of software and see what works/what doesn't. It will also provide an opportunity for the person to see if he/she likes Final Cut or Premiere better.
 
Thank you.
After talking with him more, in the longer term he wants to add some motion graphics. They will also need some light still image editing. They want me to teach them everything they want to do. So this means if I don't know the software I will have to learn it so I can teach it. And if we start with something like iMovie and then outgrow it then that means I will have to teach another program.
Since he is a student I am now considering suggesting they do the adobe CC rental plan ($19.99/mo).
I use CS6 at my company so I expect I should be able to teach him what he wants to know on CC without much extra time on my part. Of course CC locks you to forever renting if you want to be able to use your software, which I personally do not like.

Final cut x looks like a great value but I don't think it can do much motion graphics? And we still will need a photoshop type program.

Thoughts? Am I looking at this right?
 
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You can do motion graphics in FCPX (need to be pretty familiar with what's available and how to make stuff from scratch). You can also make them via the dozens of FCPX plugins that already have premade templates, and you just change colors/text, move stuff around, etc. But it depends on what you're looking to do.

But FCPX will never have all of the tools a dedicated motion graphics program will have. And that's where Motion (Apple) comes in for $49.99.

But After Effects that's part of the CS (if it is) is better. Also, if you're already working with CS at work then I don't think it makes sense to juggle the various platforms. You both might as well work in CS6 and you'll probably learn a lot more yourself while you work with the student on various projects.

For stills, there are some free pieces of software for the Mac, but again...nothing like Photoshop which would be included with CS (again, if it is).
 
Thanks again NorBro. You are always willing to help and I appreciate it.

I would LOVE to have him get CS6 for Mac and just use that. That would certainly be easiest for me since I could teach him Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere from the version I know. But I haven't found it for sale anymore. Years ago I bought CS6 for windows from the Adobe site and back then on the order page they basically said yes you can still buy it but why would you when the superior creative cloud is available.
Well now I cannot find the order page at all.

Looks like now I may actually be teaching him and his brother as they both have very different projects they want to do and their parents are on-board to try to make it happen.
So this brings up the question of what is best for them?
Their video production "career" may be over in a year once these 2 projects are done, or may carry on. No way to know yet.
Is FCPX best for them if they do continue editing?
I am extremely busy so if I take on learning FCPX and motion and some other photo program it is really going to make this much harder for me. It will detract from time I need to spend on other things.
On the plus side I would learn more software, but I really do not plan to ever use that for my business anyway. I'm just not a Mac guy.
 
I really love FCPX but some people absolutely hate it...so it's tough to say. Motion has quite a bit of a learning curve too (although that depends on general software savviness as well).

So as far as CS6...I'm sure you can definitely find it on eBay or Craigslist?

Is this it? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Adobe-CS6-...m=R40&rt=nc&_trksid=m570.l1313&LH_TitleDesc=0

If so and it's legit (they say it's brand new and sealed too but the seller has 0 feedback)...for $399 it's not much more than $300 for FCPX and $50 for Motion.

(There are others for more $ too.)
 
on the ebay listing it says "Software available for both the platforms(Windows and Mac), will be given as per customer's request"

This makes it sound like they are standing by to counterfeit whichever one you want ;)
I got burned on CS4 years ago on ebay. Bought one sealed that looked legit but wasn't and waited too long before I opened it that I couldn't dispute it.

If that is legit that is a great deal, though!
Thanks again NorBro.

Oh FCPX... I'm trying to figure out how I would be able to learn that and then teach. If Motion has a curve like After Effects I don't see this happening. I just don't the time.
 
There may be other ones on eBay (open boxes with photos of the CDs) sold by people with good feedback so that's worth a consideration, but could be hundreds of dollars more.

As far as FCPX...

Maybe watch some tutorials on YouTube (like search for things you normally would do in Premiere) and see if the workflows are something you can get use to. Are you tech savvy?

Or maybe even go to the Apple store and open up FCPX on one of the computers...at least one will definitely have it, lol. Maybe there will even be a .mov on the desktop you can import and play around with.

Places like Adorama even rent Macs...maybe find one with FCPX on it and try it out for a day or two: https://www.adoramarentals.com/p-~appmbp15tch/APPLE-MACBOOK-PRO-15-TOUCH-BAR-LAPTOP (Not sure if that one has FCP X but one of them must.)
 
jcs said:
Resolve is free and now has motion graphics with Fusion. Worth trying out to see if it will work for you.
Click to expand...


I was going to suggest the same. Alternate would be Lightworks and Fusion. You could do Media Composer | First and Fusion as well.
 
firehawk said:
So this brings up the question of what is best for them?
Their video production "career" may be over in a year once these 2 projects are done, or may carry on. No way to know yet.
Is FCPX best for them if they do continue editing?
Click to expand...

If you're talking about 'career' prospects, definitely mention Avid Media Composer First to them. It's free and has most of the important stuff to get started. If they have ambitions to be full-time editors, this is the software to be learning on. If they're planning on jumping between shooting/editing from job to job, or working from start-to-end on their own projects, Adobe CC is best as it gives them the most complete toolset. It's still good to know Avid anyway, though, as it'll let them take on more freelance editing gigs.
 
I'll second FCPX....very intuitive and you get free tech support for a year, so anything you get stuck on, the tech supports at Apple who only deal with FCPX and use it themselves in most cases I found are excellent....between them and YouTube tutoriials by Larry Jordan and many others you can learn a lot about the SW in a year, and the price is unbeatable...I've also read about Adobe users who eventually became frustrated and switched, and now have to keep up the rental fee to have access to older projects, so especially thinking long term, it is something to consider. Also, Prores RAW is likely to become a standard used by many as Prores already is, so that future proofs the SW they learn and use.
 
deltoidjohn said:
If you're talking about 'career' prospects, definitely mention Avid Media Composer First to them.... Adobe CC is best as it gives them the most complete toolset. It's still good to know Avid anyway, though, as it'll let them take on more freelance editing gigs.
Click to expand...
I should not have said 'career' as I didnt' mean a professional full time video producer. One of them may possibly go that route, but the other just wants to make educational videos. Or within a year they both may be done with video altogether
 
First will be somewhat frustrating, really thinking of going back to Lightworks. Decided to use First because we teach Media Composer and I felt I should know more about it, but some things frustrate me. Need to work with it more before I give up on it. From the simple things I've done, First and full Media Composer are the same with the only real limits being export options.

My biggest gripe across all Media Composer versions is exporting! Take a simple h.264 into mp4 wrapper. #1 it can't do it, only has Quicktime exports for this. #2 it takes a million years to complete. I've waited 5 hours for a 30 minute project to finish. It won't use all the processor cores, it won't use the GPU, it just sucks! I send things out as DNxHD, and use HDCinematics V6 convert to compress it down, this runs at about 20fps on my computer and runs all cores at 95%+.

I haven't used Lightworks in a few years, but it seemed to work more easily for me once I got over that it didn't work like Media Composer and the lingo was different. There are some export work-arounds for the free version so that you can save the h.264 to a file vs. upload like it wants to do.
 
+1 Resolve and Fusion.

My 12 year old niece wanted to learn some basic video editing so we started with iMovie but after 10 mins I was pulling my hair out so I put her onto Resolve. It's fun to see how her generation grasps it all so intuitively.
 
First needs work, too frustrating for some basic things! The following is based on Windows 10:

Thing1 - getting media into the editor often requires a transcode

Thing2 - exporting media will leave you cold... A "simple" h.264 encode (to MOV???) for a 30 minute 1080/30p video at default settings will chug along on my i7HQ system for more than 5 hours and give you a file that is huge. At medium settings you will still chug along (on one core) for 4 to 5 hours and still produce a file that is too big for upload. On fast quality the resulting time and file size just don't matter because it is unwatchable.

In the 2018.8 version they are FINALLY moving away from Quicktime, you know, the thing that hasn't been updated in like 6 years and isn't certified to run on Windows 10 to begin with. I haven't loaded this newest version yet, still on 2018.7. And I doubt I'll see any improvements because they didn't specify what the change really got you in the what's new document.

And yes I recently laid out these same concerns to me sales rep. in a phone call... As a gateway to their full versions, it will be a failure because people will give up on it. It needs to be better and handle these "non-professional" media codecs more easily (in and out). Works great if you have DNxHD files going in and exporting back out as the same.
 
Pretty sure FCPX can be downloaded as 30 day trial as well ... for them / you to check out and play around with. But hard to argue against the free (or even paid) Resolve/Fusion combo if you are just starting out.
 
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