iMovie or Final Cut Pro or...

[paintingwithlight]

Hello all,

I used to use iPhoto. I'd read about LightRoom but I figured "I can do most/all of that in iPhoto" so I didn't make the transition until I took some courses and realized that LR was superior for my purposes.

I mostly take photos and only shoot video on occasion (six times a year or so). Should I stick with iMovie or purchase Final Cut Pro? I have done a google search and found the quality of the comparisons to be questionable. Since I am a photo enthusiast that is slowly sliding into video I think that this is an appropriate forum.

Video that I shoot will be primarily short snippets of family vacations.

Thanks.

Michael

[ccphoto]

A friend of mine teaches using Final Cut Pro and from what I've seen, it is the cat's meoow. He says it's quite intuitive and relatively easy to learn to use. His 16 year old son makes incredible shorts using a simple video camera and that program.

[billtils]

Hello all,

I mostly take photos and only shoot video on occasion (six times a year or so).
Video that I shoot will be primarily short snippets of family vacations.

Michael

Michael,

iMovie will be fine for what you do. You'd only need to fork out for FCP if you were doing more (more movies and more serious editing).

Before I retired I worked with a group that made pro videos for specialist technical training and I had a copy (of FCP) for personal use that I still use on the few occasions that I need a movie editor but it's overkill for regular 'domestic' use.

[rpcrowe]

I use iMovie for quickly and simply editing my very short dog videos for posting on a rescue website. I can shoot the on my Iphone 6D+, edit it quickly and post it on YouTube all from the phone...

[Manfred M]

Final Cut Pro (FCP) 6 and 7 were considered to be the "Gold Standard" for professional editors and most feature film and television programming was put together with these tools. I used both in my own video work. There were some minor quirks like inconsistencies between how video and sound edit was done, but really these were fairly minor issues. The biggest problem was that Apple had fallen behind in their refresh cycle and some of the more modern HD formats were not supported and it was a 32-bit software.

FCP X was supposed to fix that, but when it came out, a number of professional level features were left out and the user community was rather unhappy with the product so much so that people dumped it and primarily went over to Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc. FCP went from "best in class" to largely an amateur product overnight. That happened back in 2011, so while FCP has had some point releases, it is essentially a six year old product. I would not recommend anyone moving in that dirty, given Apple's history with iPhoto, Mac Pro, etc.

Stick with iMovie if you can, but consider some of the other well supported software out there produced by someone other than Apple.

[Pippan]

I don't do video but my teenage daughter does. She'd been using iMovie for a while. I'd heard that DaVinci Resolve was the best freeware out there and quietly downloaded it. It took her a while to consider learning use something different from iMovie but when she tried it she said she liked DaVinci way better and now uses it all the time.

[Cantab]

It seems several of us are dabbling in video editing. I've taken some bird video with a recently acquired second camera, a point and shoot. It came with a trial version of Loiloscope. One option is to try using the free basic version of it. The full version is close to $100 Canadian dollars.

I very briefly checked a digital video forum and saw a reference to HitFilm. There's a free basic version to which one can add inexpensive modules. I've downloaded it but have yet to try it out.

Does anyone have experience with Loiloscope or Hitfilm?

Another option is to use the video editing component in Photoshop (hopefully it exists in CS6), as discussed here: Video editing with Photoshop CC ? .