Lindy Whitton Studio

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front the last 2 weeks as all my energy has been diverted to video editing. When I first decided to try out a You Tube channel I had no experience with video editing so I downloaded a trial version of Premier Pro which I then taught myself using the great tutorials on You Tube. It took a while but I got the hang of it All I wanted was a bit of basic cutting and joining and then a title and an end  with maybe a voice over now and then. So all was well – I had a month free trial, there were lots of tutorials and I powered through the videos and before I knew it I had uploaded 10 videos and had my own blossoming channel.

You can already see where I’m heading- yes – the 30 day trial ran out and I was so delighted with the ease of use I decided to buy it. Of course I can’t buy it but instead have to take a $20 a month subscription. Since I’m only doing basic editing I don’t need all the fancy stuff and couldn’t care less about all the promised upgrades I don’t want to pay $20 a month. What to do?

Next I decided to try the ancient version of Roxio Videowave  The Writer uses. It was terrible – really laggy and awful so no sooner was it installed than it was uninstalled!

My third attempt was to source a free video editor – Hitfilms Express. I downloaded it and discovered that there wasn’t nearly as good a range of tutorials out there but it did have some similarities with the Premiere Pro so I persisted- for a while…. It just was so hard to work anything out I finally had a brainwave. I’d just download the poor cousin of PP, Premiere Elements, for another 30 day trial and churn out another 10 videos which would keep me going for another month or two with You Tube uploads. I could then look around for the perfect software with my little buffer of edited videos.

Thought I’d cracked it until I started the first edit and saw the watermark banner right across the middle of the video! Apparantly it can only be removed when you buy the software. Anyway I kept on to see if I liked the software- it’s OK and at $130’ish a lot better buy than the subscription- but it’s a bit clunkier and misses some of the zoom features I liked in PP.

As usual I procrastinated so while I was at work The Writer decided to buy the newest version of Roxio so I may give that a go if I can load it on my laptop as well as his PC.  In the meantime I’ve gone back to Hitfilms and edited a video managing to work out the zoom, speed and titles . When I went to record the voice over I realised there is no function for that so had to find an audio editor. I downloaded  Audacity, recorded the voice over , imported into  the Hitfilms video and it all worked!

So after all that time I have one 5 minute video instead of 10!  I learned a lot and can now use the Hitfilms so maybe I won’t buy anything and just keep bumbling along. The good news is that while I’ve been messing around my You Tube channel has been gaining subscribers so I now have the amazing total of 218 – not quite viral yet but I can see it happening any day now!