Video Editing and Grading For Complete Beginner

[Luke Bacich]

Hi all,

I'm looking to finally get into video editing properly. I'm a photographer familiar with Lightroom but have never done video work, besides some very basic Final Cut Pro stuff. I've been reading the forums for a long time trying to understand a usual video editing workflow. Clearly there is no correct answer to this but I'd like to get an idea of what software I should be looking to get into.

I always thought for editing I'd use FCP. But after the backlash to FCPX along with Apple's abandoning Aperture, I'm worried about what might happen to the software in the future. Hence I was thinking of learning Premiere instead.

Obviously a huge component to all of this is colour grading. Is davinci resolve the most popular choice for this and is there an established workflow from premiere to resolve.

Could somebody please give me a basic understanding of their workflow; ie I shoot with a 5DMk3 in RAW, I take that into Final Cut Pro and organise a timeline, then I colour grade with Resolve, export some audio to Audition (this might be complete gibberish but I just wanted to get an idea on an incredibly basic level).

Once I understand the software involved and needed, I'm going to go through some lynda.com tutorials and start working on some of my own clips. Any advice on how you'd recommend somebody get started in this extremely broad area would be much appreciated.

Also I'm a uni student and can get the full creative cloud for quite cheap so I have a slight preference towards Adobe software for that reason.

Cheers

 

[arniepix]

If you already use Photoshop, then it makes sense for you to subscribe to Creative Cloud and learn Premiere. CC also comes with Speedgrade for color grading, which has an easy round trip workflow with Premiere.

BTW, I wouldn't worry about the "backlash" to FCP-X. That's mainly a loud group of people who are afraid of or annoyed by change. That group is not really as large as it seems, and some of them were not necessarily regular FCP users, or FCP users by choice. There are thousands of people who love FCP-X, including established professionals. Whether it works for your situation is a different question.

That said, editing is a craft, much like photography, that is much more the sum of the craftsman's talent & skill rather than the tools you choose to use.