Jessie-Kate
Active Member
For about 5 years I was editing videos on iMovie on an Apple computer. I wanted more fun features and less glitchiness (any heavily edited video was hell to export in that program) but I didn't have much money. I tried every free video editing program and a few free trials of some of the ones you have to pay for, but I couldn't find a program that I liked at all on Apple. Because of this I made my mind up to switch to Windows when I could get some money together for a good new laptop. Now I have that good new laptop, and I'm having trouble finding any video editing software I like, still!
I've used Filmora for 2 videos now and I do like it. It's easy to work with and has a lot of the kinds of features I was dying to play with when I was working with iMovie. HOWEVER it has some important things missing, I feel. The most important is color correcting. They have a ton of filters, but they're all too strong for my taste. I want my videos to look more natural. They have 4 sliders for editing the color manually: brightness, contrast, saturation and hue, and that would be enough (even though iMovie had more and I really liked it...) EXCEPT they don't work well! Every time I adjust any of these sliders the video looks awful. If I adjusted the same sliders (brightness, contrast, saturation) in iMovie it would make the video look 10x better, but in Filmora it only makes it look WORSE!! What is happening here? So long as I'm using Filmora I feel like if my videos aren't filmed with 100% perfect lighting I'm completely out of luck. Very frustrating. The second thing I'm missing is speed adjustment. In iMovie if a video got really long, like 20-40 minutes, I would put the whole thing at 102-103% speed and I felt like it honestly helped with the pacing a little bit not just by taking like one minute off of the video, but also by making me sound a tiny, tiny bit peppier. In Filmora I can speed it to 200%... and that's obviously not going to have the same effect!
I can probably live without the speed controls, but the color correcting is important sometimes. Does anyone have a suggestion for a free or very cheap program that I can use for color correcting, or really any suggestions at all are fine because I'm no expert. (I looked for free color correcting programs online, but they all required something I didn't have like paid Adobe video editing software already installed or very fancy equipment.)
I've used Filmora for 2 videos now and I do like it. It's easy to work with and has a lot of the kinds of features I was dying to play with when I was working with iMovie. HOWEVER it has some important things missing, I feel. The most important is color correcting. They have a ton of filters, but they're all too strong for my taste. I want my videos to look more natural. They have 4 sliders for editing the color manually: brightness, contrast, saturation and hue, and that would be enough (even though iMovie had more and I really liked it...) EXCEPT they don't work well! Every time I adjust any of these sliders the video looks awful. If I adjusted the same sliders (brightness, contrast, saturation) in iMovie it would make the video look 10x better, but in Filmora it only makes it look WORSE!! What is happening here? So long as I'm using Filmora I feel like if my videos aren't filmed with 100% perfect lighting I'm completely out of luck. Very frustrating. The second thing I'm missing is speed adjustment. In iMovie if a video got really long, like 20-40 minutes, I would put the whole thing at 102-103% speed and I felt like it honestly helped with the pacing a little bit not just by taking like one minute off of the video, but also by making me sound a tiny, tiny bit peppier. In Filmora I can speed it to 200%... and that's obviously not going to have the same effect!
I can probably live without the speed controls, but the color correcting is important sometimes. Does anyone have a suggestion for a free or very cheap program that I can use for color correcting, or really any suggestions at all are fine because I'm no expert. (I looked for free color correcting programs online, but they all required something I didn't have like paid Adobe video editing software already installed or very fancy equipment.)
