I have been fooling around with motion, but only with DSLRs and Apple iMovie. What is a good program to look into getting to up the game?
I would prefer it to be able to grade RAW footage.
Joe, sorry for such a long post.
first you have to decide where your going with this. You might not know just because you might like it, have talent doing it and all clients, even in standard movie and TV have different workflows.
Just like still photography they’re are many styles and genre’s and just like still photography you can do a lot in post, with the only difference being costs. Doing 2 frames with a lot of correction in stills is simple compared to doing a 10 minute 40 cut motion piece.
1. Are you going to 4k, 2k, both.
2. Are you going to a high bit rate digital cinema camera like RED, Arri, Variflex, F55/65, etc.
3. Are you going to do dialog (on set sound).
4. As D Fuller asks are you going to work collaboratively with other editors, or DIY.
5. Will you be required to work on location?
6. Will you have one or two DIT men/women on set. This is vital as not only can a good DIT guy keep you on track, he/she will spot any issue with camera, exposure etc and check the integrity of the data.
7. Most important. Will you get paid for this?
For editorial suites:
People will disagree because there are options in editorial stations.
FCPX out of the box if you know nothing about editing is the easiest. It’s somewhat frustrating for experienced editors and if you hand off to other editors many won’t spend much time on it.
The thing with Apple is you never know if they’ll drop the software at a whim.
AVID was the gold standard, for long form and high end commercials still is, though AVID is a big learning curve and is mainly keyboard based.
Filmworks is usually used for long form work, where the editor hands off the edit to an effects house and color grader to do finish.
Since the demise of fcp7 which had about 75% of the pro market, most editors moved to premier. Premier can be good, frustrating, stable or a crash test, depending on computer platform.
Once again D Fuller is correct on resolve’s color engine. It’s beautiful on all footage I’ve tried except for the small sony’s, but that’s just me because other than the Sony F5 and up I can’t get consistent colour from the smaller sony’s without a huge amount of work. Be aware that up to the latest beta of resolve it uses huge volumes of vram 4 gigs minimum. Resolve is good for color correction and conforming, but it’s not the most robust editor, though you can edit with it.
If your going to premier on a mac or the latest dell boxes you’ll easily be into 6 to 9 grand for a proper machine if your going to get heavy into this and edit and conform in uhd and 4k.
In fact all but the top machines can bog down, even working in proxy or some form of proxy, because the machine is still conforming to high bit rate codecs in the background, unless you tick the right boxes.
Also apple and Microsoft seem to be at war with each other, as apple doesn’t support PC’s and PC’S do not support windows media player, which nobody edits in but some corporate clients need wmv for review and I’m sure this will get more intense.
Now just be aware. I don’t care who you are, what you do, but since you seem like a person that is all pro, you’ll want to learn as much as possible. I know a lot of dp’s and operators around the world and you’d be amazed at the number of dp’s that wouldn’t know resolve if it landed on them. They add a LUT from a DIT guy/girl, then shoot, hand off the footage and go home. On a project a year ago I hired a new 2nd operator. We did a day of setup and testing and I know my cameras well, and I told him when in doubt stop it down.
Instead he went online read some post that said open up, so I ended up with hours of footage overexposed. It was a fit to rebuild skies and fake detail back into the whites.
So my bottom line is whatever you choose, always test it, even when you know it, look at it on a good screen, preferably a broadcast screen and then you know.
Best of luck.
BC