I am looking for a powerful video editor that is free. I have looked at sourceforge and there is lots but i don't know which is the best. I am making a full length movie. And need something that will make it easy to do special effects etc. They are not very advanced special effects, however I still want the best free program I can get. I only have imovie 04. And I don't think imovie will cut it.(no pun intended)
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Video editor
- Thread starter trainguy77
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Danksi said:
yes, but it is for PPC macs only and can be quite buggy on some systems. also there are very limited export options.
You really should probably just buy Final Cut Express. I don't think you're going to find a free video editor that is really good enough to edit a full length movie with special effects.
trainguy77 said:
A powerful NLE to help you pull off special effects... for free? Good luck w/that one. What kind of special effects are you looking to do? I'd suggest looking for a legit copy (not burned, something that comes w/the box and manuals) of Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express on eBay.
Lethal
I think that you will find most of the free editors to be of iMovie fashion. iMovie 6 is really good, I have seen some well edited movies done with it.. that also includes previous versions of iMovie. As long as your content is good and you have something to say iMovie will do it. If you are getting into effects that I would recommend going with Final Cut Express. Express will allow you to physically alter the image scale, create motion of video, i.e. move the video on the screen, animate photoshop layers, play with filters, etc...
Well most of the special effects are going to be very basic. Such as gun flares, Which I have been able to do by exporting a couple frames then adding them via GIMP then reimporting) But I would also like to be able to make some explosions. I am not sure how I would go about doing some of it. The movie is very much in the planning stages.
trainguy77 said:
Well then I would say go with iMovie, rough out your clips, etc. You could, from iMovie, export a clip as an image sequence and then edit it frame by frame in an imaging application and then reimport them to your movie... basically the same thing you are currently doing. Drawing on the frames is time consuming but would make for a really nice effect.
I am thinking of buying a final cut express. Since I am getting a mac pro anyway I could just either cut down to a 2 ghz CPU and get express or maybe just get a smaller HD to save a couple bucks. Do I need anything else for special effects? I am don't have photoshop either is that ok? I have been using GIMP for everything so far and thats been fine. Do I need anything for sound editing? Does it have image stabilization? I am new to this type of thing.......