You buy a car, but don’t follow recommendations on the proper types of fuel and oil to put into it, or keep it regularly maintained. It’s not going to perform well.
You build a garden, yet ignore basic care and feeding instructions. Your garden won’t last very long.
You use professional editing software, but disregard recommendations on how to best “feed” the program. You’re not going to have as smooth an editing experience as you might otherwise.
Justin Comes Clean
Not that many years long ago, I operated on the assumption that you could just drop any video file into a piece of editing software, such as HitFilm Express or Pro, and it would work. When the software frequently crashed, my initial assumption was that it was buggy software.
Let’s face it. We’re all quick to blame the software when things go wrong. “It works fine in [insert other program here],” we piously declare. “It can’t be my fault.”
Trust me. That’s not always true.
After opening my mind to the possibility that I might be doing something wrong, I went looking for more accurate answers. What I received were two key recommendations:
- Split long files into shorter ones.
- Transcode files into a format/codec combination that’s optimized for editing.
Once I began following those suggestions, my editing experience completely changed. Now, instead of suffering through multiple crashes a day, I might have one or two crashes a year. Not only that, but scrubbing through transcoded files is so much smoother.
Yes, splitting and transcoding means I can’t just jump straight into editing, but I promise you, the trade-off is worth it.
So let’s talk details now.
Splitting Files
The basic suggestion I received was that any single video file should be no longer than five to six minutes, though I haven’t taken the time to thoroughly test those limits. Unless you’re recording crazy long shots, it should be pretty easy to find natural break points in your footage.
There are lots of tools that will do the job, but at the moment my go-to program is MPEG Streamclip, which has batch processing features that make it easy to mark and export multiple segments from a long video. I’ll probably record a demo of my process some time down the road, but for now, there’s a post I wrote on the FXhome forum that breaks it down.
Transcoding
This is a bit of a deeper subject, but thankfully my friend Mike Miller put together a great video that goes through both the whys and hows of transcoding. When I do my splitting demo, I’ll probably talk briefly about my own preferences for transcoding on the Mac, but definitely make the time to watch Mike’s video from start to finish.
“But I shouldn’t have to split long files, or transcode files into a format that’s designed for editing. They should just work!”
Expecting software to perform well is fine, but if you’re ignoring numerous recommendations on how to properly use the software — not just from established users, but also from its creators — I can tell you from experience that the bigger problem isn’t the software. It’s the person sitting behind the keyboard.