If you’re going to produce your home movies, you need a computer and software. My software was pushing 20 years old - not a good choice. So I started looking around. At first I got excited by Davinci Resolve. It’s professional quality and free. Great! Oh wait, it wants at least 16 GB of RAM and a dedicated video card. My little Intel i3 only has 8 GB of RAM and no video card. Yikes! Will I even be able to edit video on my desktop? Well, what else is there?
Next I looked at Adobe Premier. Great software but it still wants 16 GB of RAM (actually, I'm wrong, it only requires 8 GB of RAM but I had inaccurate information at the time this was written) and I don’t know how will it will do on a 5 year old Intel i3. OK, I’ll keep looking.
Next I stumbled on Apple iMovie. Apart from having my Windows desktop, I also have a 2018 iPad. That iPad has iMovie on it. I played around with it a little and it worked great. OK, so I’ll use my iPad for video editing. The only problem is I don’t have enough storage on it. It’s only got 32 GB total and only about 5 GB left. That’s not enough for hours of home movies. So I did a little digging and it turns out you can import video files in from external drives. Well, I have a USB hard drive that I could use. I just need a way to plug it in. So I got a lightning to USB adapter for my iPad and BOOM, I can add storage to my iPad.
Now to try it out.
I hooked up a flash drive first with a 15 second video clip and some music. I created a new iMovie project and imported the video. It worked great! Then I added the soundtrack and started messing with the video (I split it into 2). That’s when the problems started. I started having major performance issues. My iPad would just freeze for 10 to 30 seconds and a couple of times, iMovie just crashed. Then I found out that I couldn’t actually save anything to the external drive. IMovie could see it but it wouldn’t let me save it. I could only save it internally. Turns out iMovie on the iPad is missing a lot of features that iMovie on the Mac has. Saving to external drives being one of them. This is not well documented but it is quite frustrating.
So, between the limitations and the performance problems, I decided that the iPad wasn’t going to work. Sure, if I had an iPad Pro with a ton of storage it might have worked, but I don’t have that.
So I went back to Adobe. I had looked at Adobe Premier but the hardware requirements are too high. However, I went back and looked again and I found that there’s a cut down version called Premier Rush. I can run that one on my PC. Normally the subscription is pretty expensive but my work gave me a license that covers personal use so I can use it for free.
So I fired it up and tried to pull in some of the clips I captured from my camcorder (see part 1). Umm… It turns out Premier Rush can’t see AVI files. Ugh! However, Adobe Media Encoder can convert them all into mp4 files that Premier Rush can see. So now I’m in the process of converting my media.
I’ve done a little messing around and Premier Rush is easy to use and does everything I think I’ll need it to do. I think I’ve found my tools!
I’m a little worried that converting the original to mp4 and then rendering them into video will really hurt the quality. I will have to try it out and see. If it doesn’t work, I could always buy more RAM and try Premier and see if that works.
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