Need a simple video editor? Sometimes less is more..

Key Takeaways

hey everyone Gary Simon of course etro so just last week I got back from an 8 day vacation with my family we went to Daytona Beach Florida here in the US so it was my wife and two daughters and my mommy had to come along and like most parents I have my smartphone a Galaxy S a plus that I took a million different video clips mainly of my kids nobody wants to see that except for you know their parents being me and my wife and I wanted a quick way to take all of those clips and just create a real quick video out of them it's something that still looks nice though and it has nice transitions and stuff like that so ordinarily you know like the first thought behind my mind is like okay I'm gonna have to import all these into Adobe Premiere and just you know put them up and it'll take some time and I don't need all the options and all the millions of features that you know like Adobe Premiere offers right it'll be After Effects so I decided maybe I should look for other alternative software video editors that might be more up this type of use case this type of ally where you can just use something unity you just throw your clips in and it will create a nice sort of presentation of whatever the clips are so I found this one called movavi video editor 14 I never heard of it before and never heard of the company and I they purport themselves as being and this editor as being so easy your grandmother can do it so I thought that was interesting for a few reasons first I you know in this channel I'm huge into UI in user experience and so I wanted to you know take this as a chance or a learning opportunity to see how others or how this company is approaching their UI UX for this specific challenging task and also to see if it actually does solve my problem alright so I basically it's going to this this tutorial is gonna feature me using this app along with a bunch of clips from the vacation and we'll see how it goes alright so to get started if you're interested it's movavi calm /video editor plus you can download it for free and give it a try so after installing this is the screen that you're going to be presented with and they have kind of this is this dialog from which you can either choose two options of create a project in full feature mode which is everything back here and where you're starting from scratch or a montage in easy mode and I think this is where this app shines the most in terms of simplicity and what it's offering so I'm gonna choose that and we'll see that this window right here shows up and we can see that there's a sequence so in terms of the UI it's pretty easy to understand there's also a next button so the first thing you do you add your files your media files like your route your videos and then you could choose music and they have some default options here and we go on we'll just go down on down a line so this is just some files these are video files that I took them straight from my phone and I rename them based on the content just to make it easier so I'm just not really going to choose any one specifically I'm just gonna choose a few of these just at random so I'm just holding ctrl and selecting each of those and then I could just drag them here alright so then you can position these you know based on whichever you want one you want to start first so maybe we'll have this one here very very simple there's not much else that you can do which is the whole purpose of the user experience for those who aren't tech savvy for using this montage wizard so what next and then we see we have an option for different music here to play so it's it's categorized here and this is all music that you can use so travel you know we can click discovery and it'll give you a preview of what that sounds like and once you're happy with it you can just hit plus then we can go to transitions and we'll see you can just have an automatic crossfade that will show up between your files or random transitions simple transitions etc so I'll just do a crossfade hit next and then you can have a preview all right pretty cool we can see the automatic transitions here but take the place very very simple what's really cool over here is we have some options right here so for instance a video duration the river will cut your videos and adjust them to the fit the duration the music track or to the specified length so you can drag this bar or fit it to the music length now if you have not enough clips to match the music length and it's going to extend or slow down the clips to adjust for that which is pretty handy it's really awesome so then fill black bars so if you have certain video that's in like a different crop ratio or portrait mode it'll it'll fill it'll make it so it fits to the frame and then volume balance this is really cool you can use the slider to mix the built-in audio and background music channels so if you want to hear more of the audio that's present in two clips versus the music that you chose here then you would slide this either way so if you want to hear more music it'll take it a little bit of time here just to play and then you can hear a preview of that so really cool stuff very automated which is you know you purport their self as being a toll that you know even the grandmother you can use and I have to say if your grandmother can use Windows at least or an operating system and a very basic sense then they can definitely do that so then you can just save the video you have all these different formats here that we can use h.264 that's what I use for all my videos I upload but there's also other gif we can see you can do audio only you can export it specific to mobile devices and all of that good stuff so I'm just gonna leave it this and then for filename I'll just put on let's see test YouTube vid and then I'll just say hi and it gives you a file estimation with a duration and start all right so I pause while that one and only took about 40 seconds so the file test YouTube vid is saved here so we're going to open the output folder and so now I if I double-click the video that was just saved you can see it show up off-screen here and I just have this in my player I'll pull it fast here a little bit but you see it'll automatically cut the same split but clip up into different sections so it's really handy very automated and what's cool is after you use that montage it will automatically just take the project that it created and put you into the full-featured mode with the clips and everything that it generated so that if there are areas you want to modify and you know how to then you can do so so we're not going to actually modify this project we're going to start from scratch by choosing the full feature mode from the very beginning so what I'll do is go to file new project and we don't want to save this and then we'll start here in full feature mode so this simply just takes us right to this main screen alright so now I you're someone who wants to be able to create a little bit more uniqueness and editing to to your your your project and you would do it here in this full feature mode version so it's still very simple especially when compared to some of the companion apps I know the large competitors I with millions of features so I'm going to start by just dragging on this show logo - that he did in the sand alright and I don't want any audio so the way you do this you can see that at the top we have our audio or video clip and also the Associated audio with it and we can just squash that by left clicking and dragging down and there will be no audio now we can add music as well I if we go to this section right here says music and there's a bunch of different music that you can choose so the one that I'm going to choose is based on let's see here we'll use Twilight rain coming down here and you could just double click these two listening to listen to them alright so I'm going to just left-click and drag it and voila they we go alright so now if you play this I'll take a little bit of time and then I'll start it's just a few seconds generally all right so let's add a second clip here right after this one so I'm gonna look for one called NAT Claire and close-up there we go drag that there alright and let's say we don't want this full frame well simply drag it to where we want it and maybe right around there it's my two kids there and let's also add a custom transition which is doable right here under this transitions tab and have a bunch of different transitions from which you can search for or choose the type I just want fade to black so I type in black and here we go it's a very standard type of transition alright so now I hit play let it load just a second there goes [Music] all right so then I that's simply the the very basic beginning portion of how you would begin to start your movie you would just simply add your clips and then your transitions and then after that you would get into more details because you can see when you select one of these clips you can see all these these icons that sort of highlight in the middle here so before we get to those I'm gonna add more clips and I'll just speed up this part right here all right so I just got done adding all these clips here it's only about I don't know 50 seconds long 56 seconds long and now we could just take this end of this music right here and by the way to pan up we can just use the control key and a mouse scroll wheel and we can take this and make it match up with the very end while auto snap all right so really I didn't do anything unique I just repeated the same process all throughout so it's probably worth taking some of these and squashing them down and so now let's say for instance we take a look and we just select one of these clips let's take a look at some of the options that we have here so if I go ahead and click on for instance this split this will split a track right in half or based on where you're currently selected so then you can move it wherever you want so we have two separate Clips there I selecting back here we can rotate if we want we twitch I don't want to so we'll go back there and undo that and then we can crop out certain areas if we only want to focus on a certain section and then we have the color adjustments right here so what's cool is there's auto saturation Auto contrast magic enhance and auto white balance that you can check off and will automatically provide you with a preview based on these automatic adjustments however if you want to make manual adjustments for instance one area I think I want to make it a manual adjustment maybe it would be right here I we can see that we now have access to the brightness contrast saturation highlights gamma shadows hue set temperature intent and y'all likely to use use these sliders and you know in like a moment it will load and show you the preview so if I want to take the saturation all the way down just to create a different look for this particular clip we can see that it renders just a little bit and now the saturation has been pulled down so if I hit right so the saturation has been taken down and then you can just experiment with these based on your needs let's say for instance for snail this is kind of like I would be this would be cool if this was sped up alright so so if we double click this we can see we get access to the speed of this particular clip so let's speed up to like I don't know 500 you see the the more you speed it up it'll automatically scale it down and so now that snail or wherever it is gonna go quicker [Music] alright alright so cool and then of course looking at some of the other options we have transition wizard so this is a panel there's modulus module it shows up use this transition style for all clips and that's just a quick way of replicating the process that I did here manually and then also you can record audio by clicking this if you choose now of course each clip has its own audio properties where you can take down the auto audio all the way if you want fade in and out there's also an equalizer noise removal audio effects and beat detection and you can do some cool stuff if you click on each one of those it'll just provide you with a just description here now what's also cool I under this menu here we also have call-outs that you can add so for instance if you wanted to highlight a certain area you can click on one of these and you can position it here or not position it but let's just this gives you a quick preview of it and then you can double click it or drag it to apply it based on where you want it to go I'm gonna back up control-z we also have stickers so click this and stickers you can apply stickers on top of the videos that you want to apply and there's a bunch here that you can choose from very simple we can also apply animation we can pan and zoom there's stabilization for shaky videos that's something that you'd see you know in Adobe After Effects and Premiere as well so they have this which is very handy and then you can highlight and conceal certain areas like blur out or highlights where if I just I let's see here click on this we could see that it turns it to bitmap in a sense if it's in concealed mode or highlight here otherwise you go feather it as well and change the size so very flexible in terms of that very extremely easy to use alright so I'm just gonna back down off of both of those and then also there's a chroma key section so if you're working with green screen which in my particular footage I'm not you can take out the background replace it with anything else so very very handy so at the end if you're ready to export this then simply we can choose under this type of format right here at the bottom we could choose export and we'll choose I'll just leave it at final project here and start alright so it's been I saved here going to open the output folder so if I double click here sad sort of music if I get this in here desaturate in here I forgot to decrease the audio on this one I think my wife has a fanny pack coming up here out there it is you can add a call-out actually just to highlight that [Music] all right and that is it so my thoughts on this app this movavi editor video editor 14r that i was most impressed with the very beginning portion where I used the montage editor which is a very simplified version of the program simply you you just take all your clips you drag them or you import them and then the timeline is essentially just your thumbnails where you're reordering them but I left clicking and dragging so that's the timeline and there's no other options so in terms of simplicity it's a hundred percent right there where it needs to be if we're talking about your target audience being grandmothers and people who aren't very technically proficient I and then you add your music with a very you know simple it had pretty a decent amount of user library or a library for music and then you choose your transitions you can even choose random transitions and then finally there's a few other options like adjusting the clip audio verse the music level audio and then exporting it and there you go you have your video so as with the full experience like the full actual editor I wasn't as impressed with that because I come from a background where I'm using really robust software so I'm already used to that so I think really the strengths and where they could really focus on even more it's really just pushing the fact that it is extremely simple to use especially if you use that very simple editor so hopefully we use that on a learning experience if we're product developers for instance and I know a lot of you are that you don't always have to if you're building a product or a service you don't always have to take the route of offering every feature and then some over your competition you can scale it down drastically and target a different audience so hopefully you found that useful if you like this this video make sure you subscribe here check out my site course central comm and of course if you want to check out movavi that is at movavi com alright see you guys later