Need a Good Video Editor

Hi all,
I recently acquired HD/3D 22x digital camera which shoots really clear videos. I need a cool software for my MAC book that allows me to edit videos and perform tasks such as removing,replacing background or even blurring background, and making music videos. It does not have to be expensive.
Do you think imovie is up to this game, would you recommend imovie?

Final Cut Pro might be the ultimate but are there any other less expensive wares to do the trick?

 

iMovie (current version) is the most underrated product on the Mac. Yes, it's a very good video editor. If you were doing more professional film work and needed more precise timeline editing then FCP would be better. For what you listed above, iMovie will do all of that and edit in full HD.

 

I'd learn iMovie first... then once you know it well, if some things you want to do are too limiting, then look at getting something else, but iMovie is very good.

 

it all depends on what video format your videocam uses. if it uses .mov or mp4 then your in luck. imovie will do.
if it uses .mts or mt2s then you will have to convert or use adobe premiere elements cause afaik no apple-made nle can read those.

 

*replacing background* - if you mean what I think you mean, then that is a complex process that requires more than just a video editor. You also need special shooting conditions to make it look good - ie greenscreen.

If it were easy to replace the background, film studios wouldn't bother using a green screen. They'd just hit the "replace background" button.

 

i didnt catch that replacing the background bit.
even on normal footage (not greenscreen) you can through rotoscoping. after effects cs 5 has a rotoscoping feature, but you will ne workstation class performance if speed is important to you.

 

The nice thing with mts or mt2s is that, if the camera uses standard formats (most either rely on mpeg-2, standard mpeg-4, or mpeg-4 AVC h.264), you can simply make a new video files meeting iMovie compatibility specs without having to perform a lossy-to-lossy transcode of the video portion. The audio portion might be a little tricky as the mpeg-4 container can't officially house AC3 audio but converting that to AAC wouldn't be the end of the world especially since anything recorded with the camera's built-in microphone (or an external mic) is likely going to be dialogue only and that does not require the greatest lossy encoding settings to achieve perceptual transparency.

Snow Leopard comes with QuickTime 7 and that has the ability to take an m2ts file (with the proper plug-in installed, of course) and save it as an mpeg-4 file by passing the video through (without transcoding) so long as the m2ts file houses mpeg-4 or mpeg-4 AVC video. I am not sure if QuickTime can save mpeg-2 videos but I know there are third party programs that can take an mts or m2ts mpeg-2 video and export it as a raw mpeg file without transcoding the video.

I do agree with others though in that iMovie would be the best place to start. It is one of the most feature packed free video editing programs I have come across and it is standard on all Macs (and can be purchased for $15 in the Mac App Store if you want iMovie '11). I would still recommend it for the $15 price especially since it has some more advanced features that are found in drastically more expensive video editing programs. iMovie is a pretty good way to familiarize yourself with all of the terms and features of basic to average video editing. The background replacing aspect is going to be an issue unless you specifically shot scenes for that condition. Otherwise, as pointed out, you would need a rather powerful workstation to go in there frame by frame to edit the scenes and replace their backgrounds.

You wouldn't need a green screan or a blue screen but just something with a solid color that doesn't have texture on it. I have come across online videos where people shot up against an evenly, well lit white wall and they were OK. They didn't get movie studio results and you could easily tell the backgrounds were replaced but the videos looked completely fine for any home projects you may have and for releasing videos on YouTube.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/app...-motion-5-compressor-4-now-mac-app-store.html

 

just to be annoying ... if you have a bootcamp partition already running give this a go

Lightworks

 

Let us say I use the green screen where would we go in i-movie to replace the background?

imovie seems quite basic to me and the help file seems to be so limited.

 

YouTube - ‪How to use Green Screen in iMovie 09/11‬‏

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrCR-v7aDE&feature=related

iMovie is very basic and was meant to be actually

 

Thanks A Lot- I watched the clip and tried it immediately after and it worked beautifully.
Real Nice.


Let me not push it but is there a trick in i movie to blur background?