What do you recommend for a “3rd line paid video?”
Hello Blendoodler, I wrote before some developers like Magix (Video Pro X), HitFilm (has even a free version), CyberLink (PowerDirector), Corel (VideoStudio), Premiere Elements (for Win) or Sony Movie Studio.
I personally use Movie Studio; also as I wrote none of these are flawless (or I better write was flawless as I tested them a few years ago).
It also depends on the purpose of the user; a few years ago I used VSE first as a possible alternative to Premiere, then I realised that I need something with a better GUI/workflow and no audio glitches (I respect the GUI team efforts to offer a coherent GUI in Blender, but I have to say there is a reason why most of the video editors look the same.
I also don’t think that VSE couldn’t be an alternative for many users. For now - I do not have time to test it - I would play with HitFilm as I saw potential in that app, while bigger ones are not evolving as much as they should.
So if you need an advice (based on not facts, just instinct), I would say go for HitFilm free.
I used Blender a while ago for making animations from game footage that needed to be turned into animated gifs. I initially tried to use the VSE because I heard it was suitable for simple video editing, but personally found it had a cumbersome workflow for zooming and panning around an existing video. In the end, I just put the video on a polygon and used an orthographic camera in the 3d view and the standard timeline for animating it. That process was EXTREMELY easy, but it didn’t leave me with a great deal of control over the video playback. Thankfully, I didn’t really need any more than that, and I then used photoshop to do the final conversion to animated gif.
Anyway, I was very pleased with how stable Blender was during this editing, and how well it handled the videos, regardless of size. Although I had to do some setup with regard to framerate and playback speed that I wish was handled automatically, it was a pretty simple process and I churned out around 20 of these animated gifs over a day and a bit.
Stable as hell should be a bullet point for Blender. It does crash for me sometimes, but the crashes are so rare compared to any other 3d software I used that I feel able to trust Blender’s tools and not worry about my “wrong” workflow causing problems for the buggy software.