CHAOS is looking for video editing software for us to make robot promo videos and recruitment videos. In the past we have used a hodgepodge of whatever our students already had on their personal computers. We want to get away from that strategy and move onto something more appropriate for the team as a whole.
What software is available to FIRST teams for free or on a discount?
Are their any on-line editors that would serve this purpose? (Think SAAS / Onshape / Autodesk Fusion / Google Docs)
Note:
We have no standardized OS. Some students have Chromebooks, Some have Macs , some are windows users and some are almost entirely Android users.
I’m not much of a video editing guy anymore so please let me know if there are things I should consider that i’m not asking about.
DaVinci Resolve is powerful and free. Available for Macs and PCs. I don’t know of any good online video editing platform nor anything that would be available on ChromeBooks or mobile devices.
Side Note: I do all the video editing for my team in Final Cut Pro X. Only runs on Macs and costs $300, but man do I love that piece of software.
Humble Bundle has some decent software for fairly steep discount. YMMV, as I’ve never used Video Pro or Vegas.
That being said, what I have used is Premiere Elements; which is basically a stripped down version of Adobe Premiere. Usually you can get it for like $60, $100 gets it bundled with Photoshop Elements.
Seconding DaVinci Resolve. It’s really good for a free video editor, having some basic motion features and what I understand is a pretty comprehensive color grading suite. It’s pretty easy to pick up too, I mostly learned how to do stuff in it by just clickling around the interface. Tutorials are also pretty common for more advanced stuff if you need it.
I also recommend da Vinci resolve. Really bountiful with features and things to play around with. Also is free which was a no brainer for me. Also some third party applications like Frame.io allow for multiple people collaborate on the same project which is nice if you plan on having one or more people work on the video.
You can get the full Creative Cloud suite software from Adobe for $19.99/month with a student & teacher plan. Pricing is for 1 year and then goes to $29.99/month
There are definitely some naysayers about CC both in software and it being a subscription and most are justified but all in all it’s a great bundle. In this case for video editing you can start with Premiere and grow with other options. Plus if you are looking at getting into other digital arts software is included.
Like a few people in this thread, I couldn’t recommend DaVinci Resolve enough. I ditched Adobe Premiere/After Effects because Resolve was just that much better for my needs (and also free). It plays nicer with my hardware and crashes much less frequently than Premiere did, while offering near-identical (or in some cases, better) functionality. Their color grading tools are also frequently hailed as the best out of any editing software, paid or free, so if you are looking for color tools, Resolve is a no-brainer.
So, perhaps it was just my computer, but DaVinci Resolve ran terribly when importing clips. However, the price is right. We’ve been using Avid Media Composer First for our videos (at least when I was doing it). It’s also free, and comes with pretty decent capabilities.
I’ll second this.
I actually still use Windows Movie Maker for small projects that I need done quickly, but when you need a more powerful editing tool, DaVinci Resolve is the way to go.
As an aside, I’ve also found that Resolve is one of the few free editors that supports 60+fps editing.
Resolve is what I used before my school let us install Adobe software on personal machines, and I’ll probably go back to it after high school. It does great, especially for free software!
I’ve heard HitFilm is a nice software that’s free and renders videos for free without a watermark. Personally I use Wondershare Filmora. It’s a very easy software to use, I was able to pick it up with a decent proficiency with very little tutorial help, it’s very intuitive. Almost no learning curve required to get started. I have tried downloading Davinci Resolve and HitFilm, but it did require a bit of a learning curve (but to be perfectly honest it was also kind of due to my lack of willingness to spend the time to learn how they work)
I know it’s kind of like down upon in the film industry because it lacks more complex tools, but for the videos I edit it’s more than enough to do some pretty good editing. It has all the essentials and even some more complex tools like basic masking and chromakey which provides plenty of flexibility for someone like me
As a note though it does need a license to export videos without a watermark. A lifetime license costs about $70, but using Honey I was able to get it down to around $50. For me the purchase was worth it because I used it for a long time to edit school projects before ever purchasing the license. If you want, you can purchase a license on one of your robotics computers. That way students can edit at home and can export the video from the robotics computer.
Each FRC team can now designate an Adobe Creative Cloud mentor. This mentor will receive a full license to Adobe Creative Cloud, including Premiere, AfterEffects, Photoshop, and Rush. If you haven’t designated a Creative Cloud Mentor, please do so now!
Lead mentor needs to invite the specific mentor to the Creative Cloud Mentor role in the Team Management portal.