Editing Software

We had three main options as to what we were going to use to edit our music video. Adobe Premiere Pro, Windows Movie Maker or Final Cut Express. The major differences between the options are that Premiere is installed on most computers in the school that are running a copy of Windows, whereas Final Cut is only available on the few iMac computers that the school owns. Windows Movie Maker is a free piece of software that I have installed on my laptop at home.

Either options has advantages and disadvantages. Premiere Pro is installed on far more computers meaning that there will almost always be a free computer to work at, as well as this, Premiere is the editing software that I personally, am more familiar with.Premiere also has a fleshed out suite of tools to enable me to edit the colours of a piece of footage as well as the brightness, contrast, lens flare and many others. This means that I can fine tune the footage to be exactly how I want it to be. However, Premiere can be a resource hog and since the school computers that I would be working on are significantly under-powered Premiere can be unreliable, prone to crashing and can cause work to be lost.

Final Cut is only installed on the schools iMac's, of which there are only two. This is less than ideal because of how there are three people in our group and if they are taken by other students then we wouldn't be able to edit. As well as this I have no previous experience with both Final Cut or the Mac operating system, meaning that I would have to learn how to use them, which takes time that could be used to edit. The advantage of Final Cut over Premiere is that it is far more reliable. This is because of how Final Cut is designed to be used on a Mac and interacts with the hardware far better, resulting in far less crashes and lost work. Final Cut has a similar amount of features as Premiere, however, I would need to learn how to use them all.

Windows Movie Maker is an interesting option, I have it available at home, however I am not familiar with it. It also lacks features that will prove useful and is very much a 'bare-bones' piece of software since it is free to use. As well as this since I can only work on it at home, I am not able to get advice and feedback on my work from my group.

Our group has decided to use Premiere Pro as our editing software of choice due to our familiarity with it and the extensive options that it provides us when editing our music video. The instability can be worked around with backups and saving often.