Video Editing on the Go: Good or Bad?

The expanding market of consumer and pro-sumer products is making video editing more accessible. Everyone with an iPad, iPhone, DSLR, and laptop can do it. The popularity of viral video and higher quality home video has been pushing this market for a while now.

The smartphone and tablet markets are growing at alarming rates, as are the app markets. There are several video editing apps available today on the market, including iMovie and Avid Studio (released 2/3/12). If you are shooting most of your videos on your phone or tablet, then these apps make it super easy to edit together a good home or viral video.

There are pros and cons to these apps in the video production industry.

“Mispellings” help your brand (suffer)

I can’t imagine I’m the only one who is immediately disenchanted with an online source when I come across a spelling or grammatical error. Especially when perusing news articles, blogs, and, yes, even service- or product-related corporate websites, I throw out the brand as soon as I come across an error so obvious. To me, it makes the people behind the brand seem really lazy…or at least lacking in precision and attention-to-detail.

Even in the world of “LOL” and “:)”, good writing skills are a necessity regarding brand reputation. Having clear communication shows professionalism, accuracy, care, and it proves credibility. Not having good writing skills may lead customers to believe you are also not careful with your business, or that you are apt to avoid double checking work.

Luckily, at Prizm, we have two robots who crunch all of our writing for us. Just kidding. We do, however, pay written communication special mind to avoid cranky customers like me who frown in the general direction of grammatical malpractice.

Consider the following ways to watch your back:

Editor’s Note: Pre-production is a MUST!

Pre-production is an often overlooked part of the video production process. Many people think videos are thrown together and magically come alive. It’s true, the outcome can sometimes be magical, but is it really worth the money to bet on everything falling together perfectly? What happens when the opposite happens, and the video portrays your company’s message at just a percentage of its potential?

As an editor who works with budgetary constraints on a constant basis, my advice to you is pre-production, pre-production, pre-production! If your company is spending thousands of dollars on a video, I’m sure your boss wants it to have the highest quality, maintain a good retention rate, and be as effective as possible. How do you accomplish this? Pre-production!

Editor’s note to Videographer and Client

Think you have enough footage for your video project? I highly doubt it!

Final Cut Pro X – Wired or Fired? (part 1)

As a follow up to my previous blog about the release of Final Cut Pro X, I am exploring the pros and cons of this new app.

The release of FCPX was last week, and it already received very mixed reviews across the editing community. According to the Apple app store, it has already received 153 one star ratings and 116 five star ratings. This makes me very skeptical about the purchase for our company.

Apple is releasing 64bit Final Cut!

Apple announced the release of Final Cut Pro X at NAB this week and I am super pumped for the update! While the program has been rebuilt to follow more of the iMovie platform, the biggest update for me is the 64-bit usage with background rendering.

As an editor, I am constantly improving our workflow to help cut time as well as costs, so this will greatly speed up our process! The 64-bit support will allow the program to use all 8-12 cores of the bigger MacPros and no longer be bottlenecked at 4gigs of ram. This will cut time off your