Pretty much anybody can make videos and even movies nowadays due to low cost video cameras and video editing software. If you’re one of the 87% of businesses who use video as a marketing tool, then you might be wondering how to take advantage of available software in order to produce your own videos.
While that’s a great idea, there are a few things to consider before beginning to cut your own marketing content. Sometimes the best video editing software isn’t always the right one for your company’s needs. Here’s how to figure out the difference between the two.
Understand Your Video Editing Needs
Each video production software comes with its own workflow and nuances. Choosing the right one will depend on how you want to work and the types of corporate videos you want to make.
Regardless of how advanced you want to get with your software, any basic program should allow you to join video segments, delete unwanted parts, enhance the quality, add music apply filters and possibly add motion graphics.
After those basic features, it’s best to opt for an editing program that offers benefits such as:
- The ability to be upgraded to support the increasing advances in video and content creation.
- Native support for emerging technologies that won’t require the use of a plug-in.
- A user-friendly interface that feels easy to interact with and control.
- Drag and drop editing capabilities if you’re new to video editing. This will help you get a feel for the process.
This should cover your basic video editing needs. Now, you’ll be able to dig further into the details of what you need and want.
Check Out the Specifics of Each Video Editing Program
When it comes to the higher end options for editing software, there are three main popular mass market video editing software providers: Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci Resolve 15.
Final Cut Pro X Interface
Adobe Premiere interface
DaVinci Resolve 15 interface
DaVinci Resolve 15 is the only truly free program on the list, but despite the fact that it’s free it offers industry-leading color correction tools. This immediately gives the editing program an edge over Final Cut Pro X. Color correction is one of the defining features of a truly professional marketing video. Below are some of the other benefits of using professional video editing software:
- Any higher-end video production software should provide you with color correction features.
- Adobe Premiere is great for many reasons, but it’s especially great due to the fact that it comes as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. If your company plans on editing photos and marketing materials in Photoshop or drafting up stellar proposals in InDesign, it’s worth investing in the Creative Suite.
- As an added plus, Adobe provides their software as part of a subscription. This means that for about $50/month you can enjoy all of the applications in the full suite and reap the benefits of ensuring it’s always updated.
- All of the above are great options for professional video editing. All three even support 360, 4K and multi-cam editing.
- All of the above software options have rich user forums and a wealth of information online for self help and troubleshooting thanks to huge user communities.
Invest in Quality Video Software and Equipment
View your investment in video production as an investment into your abilities to tell stories that turn into sales and lifetime customers.
It might be tempting to edit on a coworkers laptop by simply using iMovie, but try to avoid that temptation.
Why? It doesn’t support the full range of functions you’ll need to produce high-quality video marketing. You of course don’t have to go full Hollywood, but you should expect that a good set-up with a solid camera that supports different lenses, a full lighting kit, professional grade microphones and ancillary equipment such as tripods and stands to cost you about $10,000. That of course doesn’t include the computer or software you’ll need to be able to process video and media files. You could of course cut that cost in half buy not purchasing a true video camera, but you will sacrifice on the quality. Not all HD is created the same.
For example, you won’t be able to:
- Work with all types of video files. Currently, iMovie only supports MPEG-4, MPEG-2, AVCHD, MOV, DV, or HDV.
- Work with RAW camera files and export specific video codecs. Popular formats such as Apple ProRes, H.264, AVC-Intra, XD cam, etc.
- Enjoy a lot of storage space. Free or budget-friendly editors such as iMovie don’t offer the same kind of storage capacity as higher-end production software. The same applies to storage space for the video hosting.
- Edit on any device. Because iMovie is an Apple product, it’s not compatible with Windows or Linux, which makes it hard to transfer files from person to person in order to complete the edit.
- Have total creative freedom. You can do a lot of cool things with iMovie and other basic editing programs, such as Windows Movie Maker, for video production. However, it’s a lot harder to customize certain things such as titles as well as add multiple layers in a single timeline. This seriously cuts into your creative freedom.
As part of this investment and something we mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to ensure that the computer you’ll be editing on has enough power to support the program and all of the files you’ll be working with. Otherwise the rendering and exporting of your video work is going to take a very long to perform. The best laptops for video editing have powerful processors and great graphics cards.
A laptop such as Acer’s 17-inch Helios 500, for example, has a built-in 2TB hard drive and a 512GB SSD. On top of that processing power and storage space, it’s got an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, which is the type of graphics card you’ll need to accelerate plugins and visual effects.
Alternatively, Apple’s MacBook 2018 MacBook Pro has the Intel Core-i7 processor but less storage space. What it does offer, though, are Thunderbolt 3 ports that are great for storing corporate video footage on an external hard drive. In our opinion though, it’s best to invest in a high-performance desktop computer suck as iMac Pro of Mac Pro. Just keep in mind that these machines can run anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000. And that’s without a monitor.
Get Help with Your Video Production When You Need It
Yes, every video production software should come with support, but we’re talking about a little bit more help. When it comes to editing your marketing videos, you might want to leave it to the professionals.
If you’re just getting started, this is a great way to work with a corporate video production company in order to establish your company’s style, branding and editing flow. Then, if you feel comfortable enough, you can take it from there.
If you need more help making sense of creating corporate videos we encourage you reach out to one of your local video production companies or view our infographic that outlines the complete video production process.