My mates just told me about this free Beta version of a new Lightworks which was apparently a pretty popular NLE back in the 90s. It's free and from what I can tell so far it's pretty good, certainly better than Movie Maker and I think the interface is nicer than Vegas.

http://www.lightworksbeta.com/

Sorry if this seems a bit spammy, just thought I'd let anyone interested know

Will give this a try after my Sunday Ride... Nice one cheers!!! Always welcome new video software

Not spammy at all. Interesting for those of us that produce mtb videos.

I shall have a play when I get time...

I think if you're used to Vegas (I think that's what you use?) it will seem quite a basic/plain interface - certainly does coming from Avid, FCP and even Premiere. It doesn't seem quite as functional as a full-on nle but it's free and beta, so I assume they'll improve stuff if enough people make the same point. I need to re-do my whole show reel at some point, I'll try it in Lightworks and see how good it is for a proper edit

Yeah I use Vegas.

I've a huge backlog of video to sort out including this year's holiday in Morzine and my last trip to Spain. I now have my new turbo b*stard PC (6 core i7, 12Gb RAM, SSD etc etc ) up and running. I just need time to try it out!

Haha, with that you may actually manage to get a smooth preview window in Vegas

I`m with you on that score brother

With that spec you should try Snow Leopard (providing your motherboard etc are compatible) and a "free copy" of Final Cut Pro It's much better than Vegas and you'll most likely have enough power to use multi-clip properly. Really useful tool for a quick edit, it's sort of like using a live vision mixer.

does it have a problem with .mov files? i'm buying a new pc soon and in my stumbling around the internet realised that not all NLE's like .mov files... the thought of having to convert everything to .avi first is already wearing me out haha.

cheers

I haven't actually tried yet but I may give it a go shortly... so long as it's using a normal codec such as h264, apple mjpeg or animation it should be ok. With the stuff I shoot on a 7D, you have to transcode it ALL to something like ProRes before editing, as the standard mpeg 4 is a crap editing format. Transcoding is the bane of my life

so has anyone had a play with this program yet? any opinions?

Still haven't got round to having a proper go with it yet

Me neither - using what I know (Vegas) to gradually knock together a DVD/Blu Ray of last years Morzine trip whenever I have time....

And with the power of my PC the preview window in vegas is fine! Which is good as it's one of the reasons I upgraded the PC.

Can you list the spec? (Processor, Memory Speed, GFX card)
Upgrading soon, and need to match your spec if it sorts that sodding preview window!
(oh and how is your SSD, does it suffer from pausing? If not what model is it because I'll probably get one too)

Cheers.

hey DaGuv...

i'm running Adobe Premiere Pro cs5 with the following spec.... it handles full HD footage and previews everything including effects and transitions etc absolutely fine.



Processor (CPU) - AMD PHENOM II X6 1090T (3.20GHz/9MB CACHE/AM3/)

Motherboard - ASUS® M4N98TD EVO: DDR3, 2-Way SLI, SATA 3.0GB/s

Memory (RAM) - 8GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 4GB)

Graphics Card - 1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11, 3D Vision Ready

Memory - 1st Hard Disk - 1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE
1st Hard Disk Partitions 100GB, 400GB, 500GB

2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive - 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Power Supply - 600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan

Processor Cooling - SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER

Sound Card - ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO

Operating System - Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

hope that helps in some way

I've also just started using Premiere CS5 (hence why I've not bothered to give this a go ) and it's great. Sometimes has problems with unrendered footage though but think the problem is that I've got everything in odd formats so it would just about work with the old premiere (which was terrible for HD so really had to bodge it).

My spec is Q6600 processor, 4gb ram, 512mb 8800GT graphics card and a normal 7200rpm hard drive. Think it will benefit if/when I replace the graphics card to an adobe-approved one so it can use the mercury playback engine properly. More ram may also help

It's a Scan 3XS 980X Video Editing System with a few tweaks

Key stuff:

Intel Core i7 980X 3.33G (6 core & overclocked)
12GB DDR3 1600MHz
128GB Crucial Real SSD C300 with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit OS installed on it
2 x 1TB WD SATA2 WD10EARS 5400RPM configured as Raid 0 (Striped) for storage.
ASUS GeForce GTX 470 ENGTX470 Video Card (1280Mb)
Panasonic Blu Ray writer

SSD has been fine so far



It always does with video editing but remember that 32 bit versions of Windows can only use 3Gb. No point in putting more in unless you have the 64 bit version of Windows.

Yeah I've just put 64 bit Windows 7 on, it's a lot better for recording music and such now I can use the extra 1gb that I wasn't using in 32 bit.