An inexpensive editing solution

My wife persuaded me to buy a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and a Lumix G Vario 12-35mm F2.8.8 lens. I did not reckon upon the complex and expensive editing programs recommended or DaVinci Resolve. However, I found a solution for me at least. Wondershare Editor for Mac allows me to edit the video files, add titles and adjust the hue and saturation, and then to record to a DVD with a simple menu or upload to YouTube or Vimeo, etc. The results whether for film or video are very pleasing. I haven't figured out DaVinciResolve Lite. Hope this is of interest. John Cannon

I use Final Cut Studio, and it works well with my BMPCC. I do not use resolve, and I can still do some simple grading in Apple color. Since it seems the professional world has moved on, maybe you know someone who has an unused set of discs laying around. You can render out stuff to iDVD. This is what I did. Unlike most here, I'm on an extreme budget and have to use what I can get my hands on cheap and free. $1000 for a lens here and there doesn't work for me. If you're starting out, Final Cut Pro 7 works very well with what the camera shoots. That's just my two cents.

I did not reckon upon the complex and expensive editing programs recommended

Did you try iMovie? It's free & simple.



Wondershare has trouble cutting up clips. You can trim off the ends, but you can't take a bit from the middle and use it elsewhere. iMovie works better and is still very friendly.

Meeting somewhere in the middle is Edius by Grass Valley. We stumbled across Edius when we found Adobe Premiere CC struggling to be able to handle multiple streams of HD video with the AVCHD codec. We had read that edius was really good with that codec...and sense we mostly do multi-camera editing of AVCHD files, we thought we would give it a try. The cost was right: under $400 for a cross grade (if you own basically any other editing platform). At first it took some getting used to...it looked a little different, things were arranged differently, slightly different terms for some things...but all in all once we got used to it...we started falling in love with it! So many things are just easier to do...not to mention that even though I am on the same system I can throw 5 lines of HD video, play them all at the same time, and it does fantastic. I have even edited video on a $300 laptop in a pinch with Edius and it worked good enough to do what I need to do. It also has a decent DVD/Bluray burning option built into the timeline...so you don't have to write a file, bring it into another program, and then make your chapters and then burn your DVD. I just do it all in my timeline, and I have learned lots of tricks on how to work with the admitted limitations that it has running from the timeline. Still, for the majority of projects we do, it is the perfect fit for us. The difference in time that I have to make changes to go between a DVD and a Bluray is practically non existent. I love that since we always master in both formats now. Prior to this I had used Adobe Premiere since version 6.0 (that was like about a decade ago). OH, one more thing...crashes are super rare...and when it does eventually happen, it's even rarer to actually lose anything. Sure I sometimes get a hang...but it almost always recovers. With Premiere...it was getting to the point where we couldn't even edit without going through the lengthy process of making proxy files. And I have always experienced bugs with Premiere that would make random drop outs in my video. They would only appear once in a while, and they were definitely on the render...and it was a big reason why I lost faith in the reliability of Premiere and started looking elsewhere.