adventures in video editing

ow. flask brain hurty-hurt.

ok, so i have been making some little videos on and off, and i have for most of that time been perfectly happy with imovie, which comes installed on any mac you buy. for a thing that just comes with your machine, it actually does a lot of stuff and most people don't need more than that.

every once in a while i thought it would be really nice if i could do some more advanced things, but i was pretty much resigned to the idea that more advanced editors are going to cost some advanced cash.

to nobody's surprise, if you want to spend upwards of $500, you can get a video editor that will teach you to tapdance.

what i wanted was just something a little more advanced than imovie that would let me layer my clips.

a lot of editors have a cheap r free version that purport to allow you to do this, but then it turns out you can only have two layers. - heck, i can squeeze two (not very modifiable) layers out of imovie!

i found a promising looking free editor that worked great (ok, reasonably well) except that it crashed every five seconds or so.

bear in mind that i figured on spending something like $50 to get what i wanted, but there's no point NOT looking at the free editors.

videopad looked really good on the surface, but there was a lot of functionality you could only buy and even though i would have paid for a full version, it was interesting for the company to offer a bunch of different sound editors and upgrades and i started to think that with all the frequent crashing and the price of add-ons i might just use something more hassle-free.

and then i found wondershare, which on the face of it was just what i wanted with tons of features besides the one feature i really need, which is the ability to multilayer video.

and it's kind of tricky, because they make it for PC and for mac and the pc page is the default and lists all the features and even looking closely on the "download for mac" page it's nto really clear if it has the same features.

so i got on the live help chat and asked the nice young man if the mac version of the software includes PiP (picture-in-picture) capability and ater a few minutes he tells me that not just yet, but if i buy the software today the engineers are working really hard on that and soon, maybe there will be a free upgrade.

so.

no.

then i found a very robust full featured FREE editor but when i looked into it, it involved some kind of complicated steps  to install and run it in terminal.

i'm an artist, not a computer engineer, ao although if you give me a list of complex instructions regarding HOW to make things happen in my computer i can usually pull that off without too much difficulty, but this baby had a complex list of instructions to GOT to the complex instructions and as far as i'm concerned, one layer i don't really understand of mucking about with my computer is probably ok, but two (or more- i couldn't be bure) layers of instructions i don't understand is probably just asking for trouble and maybe a new computer.

and then i found what looked like a DREAM EDITOR and it was only FIVE DOLLARS and i went to download it, but it turns out i needed to upgrade my OS for that one.

but that's ok, since i've been toying with upgrading my OS for a while now, so i did that.

and now i have to relearn how to do a lot of things i used to take for granted, because new OS. it's mostly all improvements as far as i can tell, but there's still a learning curve.

and the new editor seems to do just what i want it to do, except it does a LOT of things and even though the documentation is pretty good, it hurts my brain a little to be learning it.

i had hoped at this point to be posting some cute little videos i made with it, but i am still figuring out how to work it.

i'll talk with you later.