Been working on this for waaay longer than I expected :) Anyway, I'd love to hear about your video editing struggles, so I can fix them :)
So many of my relatives ask me where Windows Movie Maker went - it wasn't the most powerful tool of course, but it was so easy to use and arrange videos with, especially for not too tech-literate people.
There's nothing that comes close, especially not what MS has built-in at the moment (basically just generating videos from slideshows with confusing UX).
There are many competitors, and most have at least some form of a free version[1]. My pain in DaVinci is different than in Blender, and for all I know, everything could be solved if I ever spent enough time in either.
You've come up with another to add to the mix, and I appreciate that you want to fix pain points and make something good. But please explain what is different about your offering that made you decide to start to build it - why it is different!
(Unless you just built it to learn how to build it, and there is nothing differentiating your program. In which case I have a world of respect for you, but that's quite a bite of pie you took.)
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/best-free-video-editing-software
- Maybe you can look at (linear) music DAW's (reaper, cubase, logic,studio one) for inspiration on UI; track grouping/labeling, fades
- what I longed for years ago was an easy way to; (non destructive) editing on low quality copies of source material, and using their HQ originals for rendering.
- the use of VST plugins for the audio part
- A while ago i read about software to cut video files without rerendering / converting(dunno if thats common, or useful, but sounds interesting)
Most video editors don’t help users with audio.
Ideas:
Templated signal chains for individual audio tracks that include simple things such as gate, subtractive eq, compression, additive-eq
Templated master audio signal chain that can include simple compression / limiting , eq, and maximizing with a specific target LUFS in mind (based on where the user intends to upload as different sites have different ideal loudness)
Level suggestions for tracks, based upon if they are dialog, music-bed, room tone etc
Automatic level adjustment to bring the music bed up and down based on other tracks. Or simply the ability to generate suggested level automation.
Actually, automatic suggested level automation on any track independently would be really useful for things like dialog and interviews.
Not specifically audio, but being able to output multiple different renders depending on target website with a single click. (Ideal container, codec, resolutions, ratios, LUFS, etc). Even with predefined templates in other editors I have used, I still need to select and queue each render specifically.
Of course these suggestions are very reductive, but even the basics go so far in making a video not be bad.
Ultimately bad audio can make the best video unwatchable. Give the user some optional guard rails.
Oh yeah, don’t forget to transparency account for audio processing latency. Else lips won’t sync with dialog. Saw that happen with a beta version of an editor a few years back when they added VST support.
For me, 99/100 times all I want to do is trim, split, have multiple tracks, have some fades, add text (animation or not), and lastly read and output various codecs.
Update: I had a thought right after posting. Basically if you could take Shotcut, but make it look and feel more like Sony Vegas, I think you hit the nail on the casual/semi-pro you're looking for.
In every editor I used, they usually miss YUV support and OpenEXR support (monochannel 16bit images for example). It would also be terribly useful to me to be able to zoom anywhere in the frames and get the precise color values and location of any pixel.
A fast way to open two frames of the same file or of two different files side by side to compare would also be extremely useful!
My current work flow is to use
1.YUVView which cover YUV and zooming but it has different bugs [1]
2. OpenCV for OpenEXR, and use the debugger to inspect colors.. It is terribly painful to compare two images :)
If someone has better way to analyse this kind of files I'm very interested!
Here's what i need from a video editor : ability to cut/copy/move video across timeline
add/remove audio tracks and adjust their volume + mute certain parts
apply cool transitions here and there
add text overlay and text frames
and all this without the 1000 knobs and buttons in the pro editors, and without the buggy and ugly free editors
I would pay 10-15$ for such editor per year. After all it's for casual use. anything more than that and it would make me wanna pirate it.
Use as much power of my gpus as you can, if I have a high end nvidia gpu I want to see it acting like a hot knife through butter.
When I drag footage in a timeline update the display, Premier shockingly doesn’t do this.
Reload footage button, another thing Adobe Premier doesn’t have.
- file formats and conversion. Maybe auto-conversion could happen in the background while I cut with low-res?
I don't use windows movie maker but there's a lot of laymen people that still do because they understand it and it works. I haven't been able to replace it for them yet.
Make is super easy to do simple tasks: crop, blend, merge separate clips and insert transition and texts. This covers 90% of needs.
If you tackle this - it's a winner.
1. Rotate all or parts of a video. 2. Crop all or parts of a video.
Either these are features nobody wants or I'm just not good at operating video editors.
The more magic you can do for the average user, the better (e.g. how Lightroom or Instagram work for pics)
even if it needed Wine.