Video editing suite.

[Asomodai]

My school has bought a very nice professional Canon camera for our new media students. We also ordered Avid Studio at £150~ for 5 licenses. However the company who produced it was bought out and consequentally stopped offering that software.

 

We just need something fairly featured for as cheap as we can get it! What have you guys used which could fit the bill? I was looking at Sony movie studio platinum, but it has been a long time since I last used video editing software.

 

We are running Windows 7.

 

Cheers in advance!

 

R

Edited January 17, 2013 by Asomodai

[FragglePete]

The Sony Vegas Movie Studio suite can be purchased as a site licence for education for around £580. I purchased my own copy for home use a while back and love it; very easy to use. We've got a site license here for CS4 with Premiere, but it's a monster and just fills up users AppData folders; thankfully not many people use it.

 

Pete

[Asomodai]

Good good, I should have also mentioned, only 5 licenses are required and the laptops will be standalone, no network connections.

[john]

The Sony Vegas Movie Studio suite can be purchased as a site licence for education for around £580. I purchased my own copy for home use a while back and love it; very easy to use. We've got a site license here for CS4 with Premiere, but it's a monster and just fills up users AppData folders; thankfully not many people use it.

 

Pete

 

The AppData issue is easily cured by setting up your Projects correctly in Premier Pro We had this issue and with roaming profiles the logons took hours before our new Juniper network and now they zoom past anyway. You have some settings in the project about the video cache (Cannot remember where off the top of my head) but you set them to your documents folder as well and all is good. We tell students to make a Media folder and then a folder in that for each project / task and inside that make the cache files and you are all good. AppData issues are no-more

[laserblazer]

I'm Adobe through and through because that's what I was brought up with. However, unless it sits on its own personal little computer, that has equivalent power to Deep Thought, it tends to get unhappy and crash a lot (by it, I mean anything from Elements to CS6). The real world of media still tend to use Apple products and Final Cut Pro. So, unless you can offer them that, you may as well use Movie Maker or other cheap and cheerful products. In some ways that's a good thing because it will teach them real-time editing. By that, I mean planning their shoots to minimise the amount of editing they need to do.

[RTFM]

The AppData issue is easily cured by setting up your Projects correctly in Premier Pro We had this issue and with roaming profiles the logons took hours before our new Juniper network and now they zoom past anyway. You have some settings in the project about the video cache (Cannot remember where off the top of my head) but you set them to your documents folder as well and all is good. We tell students to make a Media folder and then a folder in that for each project / task and inside that make the cache files and you are all good. AppData issues are no-more

 

You get the option right at the start of setting up a new project when telling it where to setup scratch disks to etc

[john]

You get the option right at the start of setting up a new project when telling it where to setup scratch disks to etc

 

Those are the ones you can change mid-project as well and it moves the files over:)

[dave.81]

We buy Adobe Photoshop & Premier Elements when we did our media suite. Although looking at what they have to produce there is no reason they couldn't get full marks using movie maker or some online video editor.

[Asomodai]

So did a bit more digging into the situation. Our camera uses only Canon MXF files. This greatly reduces our choices to either Edius 6.5 or CS6 Premiere. Apparently there has been some problems with premiere and Canon MXF files, anyone care to chime in on their experiences?

 

The Edius trial is working well.

Edited January 22, 2013 by Asomodai

[jallsop]

It's been a few years since i bought new AV kit, but one of the reasons we bought HD home user stuff, was it compatibility with most basic editing programs. If you're using a pro camera, then it often requires pro software to decode the footage.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could convert the MXF to a more common format, and then use simpler tools.

We used to use Serif Movie Plus, as it can be run on a fairly low end pc, has some nice tools, and we found it more stable than any other windows based video editors.

 

That said, we did use Macs, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe CS4 for the more adventurous.