Video Editing - am i a moron ?

[DigDog]

This is gonna be mostly a rant because, i am unsatisfied with the VE ive used but i dont know exactly why.

I started with ... fraps? Obs? Anyway maaany years ago with something probably called Easy Video Editor or something with "Free" in the name. On W95 or so. And you'd just drag drop click and bam! your video was done.

Years later i got decent at gaming and wanted to upload some videos so i said to myself "hey, lets buy something that doesnt suck".

I had bought something that gave me a discount on Cyberlink Powerdirector and decided to drop some moneys on it. Maybe £25 not sure.

And it didnt work for me.

The timeline tools were decent, i easily got extra audio tracks on it, text, but ..
I get my video from Shadowplay, all recorded at the highest bitrate settings available, onto a dedicated SSD. You'd think that saving 1080p 60 video to 1080p 60/24/23.97 would be easy.

No matter how hard i googled "powerdirector youtube settings" icouldnt get anything above potato. This by selecting "youtube high quality" from the presets, too.

Abdolutely grainy laggy garbage end result. (The source shadowplay file plays perfectly)

About 1 year later i decided to go all out and paid like £79 for Sony Vegas. This was my attempt at solving the issue through money.
Horrid timeline tools. Common pc file formats not recognized. Crashes. Desyncs. Plus ... did i mention how horrid the tools are?

Vegas worked better than Powerdirector, actually producing 1080 videos that *mostly* ran fine, with the occasional encoding mishap. I still cant get reliably a video to edit the way i want it, be it framerate drops, desyncs, or the resolution going crazy.

Then about a year ago im talking with a guy that now owns a VE business and he gives me a 1 year Premiere license. This is the x86 industry standard, Toy Story was edited on it, SURELY THIS WORKS FLAWLESSLY RIGHT??

So i take a shadowplay file, drop it in, figure out the basic tools, snap off head and tail to keep about 30 seconds of footage, and add a mp3 voiceover.
Save.
Export.

WHAT THE THE VOICE DESYNCS !

check the source file, nope. Works fine.

All i want is that ypu take this mp4 file, cut 30 sec of it, add an audio track. Can you do that ???

Of course not.



Oh but wait you need to process your files befooooore you ..
No YOU wait.

This worked in the 90s. If the software needed to process a file to avoid drops or desyncs it would either tell you, or straight up do it for you. What you see play in the timeline is what you get if you export the video.
Ive literally processed a 1080 mp4 by adding it and then exporting it and ive had quality drop. NO ALTERATIONS. No editing.


Is this a ploy to get me to move to OSX?
AM I A MORON? Is there something obvious that i am missing that only an imbecile would miss?

 

[mxnerd]

Googled.

https://www.how2shout.com/tools/best-free-and-opensource-video-editing-software-for-windows.html

Never used any of them.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm. What track is serving as your master timecode? If both the video and audio are VBR, I can kind of see why it might desync.

Also, edits normally happen on "key frames". How often do I and B frames show up in your ShadowPlay capture file?

 

[DigDog]

Although i trained in audio engineering, i know nothing of what you told me. I go as far as SMPTE code.

1. I do not have a separate master timecode. But i imagine it would be the shadowplay mp4 video track.
2. Im talking the audio FROM THE SHADOWPLAY desyncing from the shadowplay itself.

The video is this

Its 19 seconds. This was a 5 minute video that i cut. There is both a frame skip (right at the beginning when i throw the gas grenade) and the BAR shot sound desyncs from the video.

I dont know what I or N frames are.
Im sure there is a lot i am missing but i also expect the software to be able to handle simple things like different framerates. I want to be able to edit solely using time lenght ignoring the details underneath.

 

[Iron Woode]

There is a huge difference between the 90's and now. Back in the day youtube re-encoded your video to flash and made good video look like crap.

Here is an example from my Youtube channel:

The source video looks great but youtube ruined it.

I have only edited avi and Mpeg2 streams. MP4 editing always gave me issues.

Perhaps using a raw format for the video might work out better?

I didn't do any fancy editing, either. Just removed commercials or tidied up something I recorded on a camera. Muxing and demuxing were about as adventurous as I would get.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Are you recording the audio with same device doing the video? If not things can get complicated, because the sampling rates might not match, and audio might be a tad faster than the video or vice versa and it will show over time.

I use Kdenlive and it's been fine as far as that goes, but I do sometimes find that program can be quite quircky or missing features so I often contemplate switching to a Windows based solution and just running it in a VM but I find that's a pain in the ass to do as it still involves having to manage a windows machine. Antivirus, file shares, turning off spy stuff, dealing with updates etc...

 

[DigDog]

Are you recording the audio with same device doing the video?

Yep. Both video and audio come from the Shadowplay file. I may add some additional audio on top but the desync is between audio and video originary of just one file.

I ... was actually considering turning my older 4670k into a linux/kdenlive machine ..

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yep. Both video and audio come from the Shadowplay file. I may add some additional audio on top but the desync is between audio and video originary of just one file.

I ... was actually considering turning my older 4670k into a linux/kdenlive machine ..

That's odd then. I do recall Windows video editing being sketchy sometimes, even though the editors seem to have so many more features... maybe it's just some weird quirck with that particular file format or something. There's so many different codecs/formats etc it's kind of ridiculous and you don't really have control over it as it's whatever the equipment puts out.

 

[Bardock]

I always liked virtualdub