Thinking about getting into edits... +k for good answers

bieberhole69.

bieberhole69.

Member
So I'm thinking about buying either a gopro or contour for mostly skiing, maybe some wakeboarding. I can get 40% of contour, so with that price difference in mind, which should I get?Also, what's the best free editing software out there? I know contour comes with one and gopro probably does as well, would that be enough for basic edits?

And will 4gb of memory be enough on my pc?

Thanks
 
I don't do ski edits but do some video edits for work, so I can help on a few points:

4gb is nowhere near enough. You'll have to buy an external or something (though an external is slower than in internal), video editing is one of the most space/ compy hardware intensive things you can possibly do. Unless you're real patient/ want low quality vids for now.

To start out editing maybe just try the free stuff you get with the camera. Should be easy to use, and will get your feet wet. After that if you're still keen, I'd go straight to a pro-grade editing tool. Otherwise you're just learning software that you'll have to forget/ replace again later. Adobe Premiere or something similar isn't easy to learn but it'll go the distance. You can dl trial versions from the Adobe site, and there are ways of not paying for the full version after that... (unless you have a few k around) Once you are doing commercial work you can make it up to them by buying a license.
 
Maybe a beginner mistake is to make ridiculous transitions with stars, dots and shit. Keep it clean, dissolve to black, to white, to next shot, cut (on rythme point of interest if you can). That will keep your edit from being a gaper edit if you see what I mean.

 
yeah, but it really depends on everything else. If your on a desktop and know what your doing, I would put another 4 gbs in for the $30 or however much it is. Ram doesn't make a huge difference though, its dependant on your cpu and video card as well. My advice is to try it and see how smooth it is. I can edit a 10 minute project in FCP on my MBP but once I have too many projects it really begins to slow. Whereas my desktop I have about 800GBs of raw footage and projects in FCP and it can handle it pretty well. Just try to keep your editing system clean, and try it out.
 
I only have 2gb or ram and it works okay. It depends on the software you are going to use to edit and the video format you will be editing.
 
I would go with the GoPro. The image sensors in both are almost completely identical, the big decider between the two is the lens. The GoPro's lens is larger and higher quality, so you get more light in and a clearer/sharper picture (all this diagnostic of the two comes from my best friends father who's business is in building specialized cameras for the military so I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about). Also another upside to the GoPro is if you happen to scratch the lens you can just go and buy another one for not too much.
 
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