What I Use for Home Movies

 I think I've finally settled in on what tools I'll be using to edit/produce my home movies.  It's not where I thought I'd end up but it's working for me.

Conversion - Adobe Media Encoder

The raw output format for my home movies is AVI.  It seems nobody uses this anymore and that creates a problem.  The solution is to convert the AVI files into a file type I can use.  In my case, I'm converting the AVI to h264 files - the default for Adobe Media Encoder.

Adobe Media Encoder is a great to for media conversion.  It's great because it's simple.  I had all my captured video in one folder and Media Encoder grabbed everything there and converted it.  The converted files went into folder named "output" and the originals got moved to a folder named "source".  Simple and effective.

Media Management - Adobe Bridge

If I'm to make theme-based video clips, I need to be able to assign tags to each of my captured video files.  Then I need to be able to sort and filter according to those tags.  Adobe Bridge is great for that.  I can create tags like who is in the video, what they're doing, etc.  I can sort and filter so that I only see the files that match the tags I'm interested in.  Then, when I've sorted out what I want to use, I can export the files directly into an Adobe Premier Pro project and get to work.

The only drawback I've run into so far is that it doesn't support tags on AVI files.  Of course, that's one of the reasons I'm using Media Encoder.

Video Production - Adobe Premier Pro

I wasn't going to use Premier Pro.  I not trying to make Hollywood level movies.  I'm not even trying to make Youtube movies.  I just a basic video editor that will stitch my movies together with a little editing and let me add background music.  I used Pinnacle Movie Studio and Vegas Movie Studio way back in the day and they did fine (except Pinnacle kept crashing during rendering - but it's been 15 years, I'm sure that's not a problem any more).  I tried out iMovie and Premier Rush and they were great as well.  So why pick Premier Pro?

It's because I'm using Bridge to manage my media.  I will use Bridge to locate the media I want to use for my movies and then export them directly to Premier Pro.  Since Bridge doesn't support exporting to Premier Rush, I'm going to use Premier Pro.

My Workflow

My workflow is pretty simple:

Captured Video -> convert to h264 via Media Encoder -> organize and tag with Bridge -> create videos with Premier Pro

Do you need to do it that way?

Of course not!  Find the tools that work for you.  If an Adobe subscription works for you then great!  If you need something more cost effective, there's a lot video editing software out there that will work just fine.  If your workflow is better served by something else - do that. 

Home movie production is just as personal as your home movies.  The important thing is that you create something you and your family can enjoy!