Question about video software

I'm asking this for someone else, I don't have a lot of data. I am absolutely not a video person, don't even watch it much.

The guy wants to make a youtube channel, he did one video and uploaded it, and it was a difficult process for him, and he says that where things said to click, he didn't have a button, etc, is very frustrated.

I asked what he uses, Windows 10, gen 6 ipad, he has a Galaxy 12 android phone that was worse than the pod/computer setup.

Is there good software he could look at? Is there good information, tutorials etc out there he could see? Where would he look, what are the words he wants to use to search with?

Thank you for any help you can offer :D

My experience has been that good video editing software tends to have quite a learning curve to it. The good news is that you can usually find short tutorials addressing the specific problem with a YouTube search. I recently switched to VSDC from DaVinci Resolve (due to it's 3D video capabilities in the free version) and even though I've got some experience with video editing I probably typed "VSDC how to ____"  half a dozen times in the YouTube search bar while making the first video.

Making the second video tends to be much easier than the first, but it takes a while to get the hang of these things.

This was my journey https://permies.com/t/133957

It might help show some places to start.

Maybe you could talk them into chatting on permies,  i would love to get more video discussions going.

Since the person wanting to learn how to make videos has a Windows 10 computer, I would recommend that you start there, with the software that they already have. Click on the Windows start menu and type "video editor" without the quotes. That is exactly the first thing I did the first time I wanted to try to edit a video file. I checked to see if Windows had a tool that ships with the operating system.

To my surprise, there was a built in app named "video editor" and it was intuitive enough that I managed to take a friend's collection of trail camera videos and combine them into a single file to upload on YouTube. I reposted the sample video just now for this thread

Since that one time in October of 2021 I haven't had a need to edit any more video files, but now see that Microsoft has produced their next video editor called "clipchamp". Both of Microsoft's video editors are documented here: Microsoft Windows 10 video editing apps

Here is the documentation on How to Create a YouTube channel which I will admit I have not read. I did try reading the documentation a year ago and found it confusing. YouTube is not the only game in town for posting videos, but it is the most well-known. Since I have almost zero experience posting videos, I'll let others more qualified address that subject. I will comment that even though I've been a software developer and computer infrastructure engineer, I find the whole YouTube channel creation and management user experience sufficiently confusing to keep me from wanting to learn more about it. So if you find the YouTube authoring experience confusing, that isn't on you. It is a somewhat complicated process and I think they haven't done a very good job of making it easy to understand.

Kdenlive is a solid free video editing program! We started by using openshot (also free) but had problems similar to what you're describing. Another handy one is OBS (free, lets you record what happens on your screen into a video, which always seem to come up in one way or another).

I hope those can help!

Openshot is usually good, though some versions have been broken.

They just released a new version I haven't tried so I don't know if it works for me or not... I'm a little scared to update, because the last time I did it broke.

I'm currently using: version 2.5.1

I supported the kickstarter and I have to say, since the kickstarter it has really improved a lot to be the standard cross platform video editor I always hoped for.

I've used final cut pro for editing work I did in university. I prefer openshot.

If I were doing cinematic work and intense greenscreening with keyframe animations and managing color profiles and such openshot would not be sufficient, but for your average youtuber, openshot will get the job done.

Youtube itself has some basic video editing options available though in their studio suite, as well as a remarkably deep library of music and sounds that are free to use. If your friend can get the video files onto Youtube, it's probably possible to edit mostly with their cloud software.

L.Johnson wrote:I've used final cut pro for editing work I did in university. I prefer openshot.

I've just downloaded it.

I should have given my money to these people.

The software is very similar to Wondershare's Filmora but multi platform and you can do picture in picture.

Thank you all for replying! I'm taking notes....  :D

I think his problem may be more getting a video onto youtube. I may be wrong, as I'm a computer person but absolutely not a video person, and he's neither one (but trying to be a video person,) so there may be garbling in the communication between us as we use different words.

I looked at the link posted earlier about how to make a youtube channel, he's done that. So I'd say it might be more how to make his computer/pad upload a video to it.