I need help with power director video editing software

[Ken "Skip" Hill]

I am contemplating doing the editing of my Till I Collapse DVD myself as I am a control freak and I have plenty of time to learn it before I start filming.

I am filming in 4k high def and the software looks relatively user friendly but I have no experience with any editing of any kind.

If anyone has experience with this software and can spend a couple hours teaching me the basics, I will either pay you or trade out training/consulting time.

Please contact me if you can help.

Skip

[kjcmjc]

Skip, I do some video editing not professionally but mostly family stuff. I did a video for Dave Liberman who puts on the Natural Ohio and Natural Northern USA every year. You can go to youtube and search under
"NPC Natural Ohio Highlights" it was made in 2010. I did not take any of the video, I just put it together and Dave approved what he liked and did not like.

What I do know is if you are doing the video in HD you need a fast computer with lots of hard drive space. HD uses a lot of space and to render in HD you need a fast CPU. Also you probably will not fit a rendered HD video onto a regular DVD, you will need a BluRay disc. You can burn HD to a DVD but you will lose quality because a DVD is 720X480 vs HD which is 1280X720 or 1920X1080.

Some software is easier to use than others. I use Sony Vegas Pro. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro has a very steep learning curve but is very powerful.

The way I learned is by sitting up till 3 or 4 in the morning trying to figure things out, and when I got stuck Google was my best friend.

If you are making a simple video without a lot of special effects it will be pretty easy. But like I said when you load up HD video especially with overlays etc on the timeline with a slower computer your work flow will come to a crawl. Good Luck.

[Ken "Skip" Hill]

The software is Power Director 13 - not sure if you are aware of it or not.

The DVD isn't on disc, it is online but I refer to it as a DVD so that people understand what I am talking about. This will be the sequel to the Longevity DVD which can be found here, if you want to see what it is: TEAMSKIP.net. Chris did an awesome job on it but this was a while ago and I want this one to be clearer with better video quality, sound quality and effects.

Can't I just use an external drive to store everything?

Skip

[kjcmjc]

You can use an external drive to save. The only thing with external drives are if using USB 2 it will take forever to move HD video to the external drive. If you have a USB 3 drive and port on your computer it is way faster. I do not store on a removable drive and have read that some people like them and some do not when it comes to editing. I do know when you go to render and the video is coming in from the external drive it will take a lot longer than if you render from an internal drive. Same when you render out to an external drive.

I edited my earlier post but I do not think it went through. The first thing to do is LEARN HOW TO SAVE YOUR WORK. Most software has a auto save feature do not trust it. You can manually save your work. Most video editing programs especially with HD crash and if you are not saving your edits sometimes you have to go way back and start your edits all over again. SAVE YOUR WORK AS YOU GO. Maybe every ten minutes.

On my system I have 3 hard drives one for the OS and the program, one to store the videos, and one to render too. Hard drives are pretty cheap now and easy to put in. If I was you I would look into getting a big internal drive for storage and rendering.

I looked at Power Directors specs does your computer meet the minimum specs? Look at HD specs not at DVD specs since you will doing HD.

I have seen your last video. Make sure who ever is filming gives you at least a 6 to 10 second lead in and lead out time. That way when you edit you will not directly jump into a scene.

[Ken "Skip" Hill]

I will have to check on all of this to be sure but I believe that my computer is compatible for the hd specs, yes.

ADD: Where did you find the hd spec guidelines for Power Director?

How big is "big" for an internal drive?

I have a couple questions for you but would prefer to ask you via email. Can you email me at: [email protected]? Thank you.

Skip

[armyguy99]

I've done quite a bit of editing for my youtube channel, I have somewhere around 100 videos there, but I just used windows movie maker for my stuff. Worked fine for what I was doing.

I would go with a 1T external..they are pretty inexpensive these days.