Making movies: Videography, film-making, long and short-form etc for Ilxors new and old to the game

A general-purpose thread for writing, producing and editing film.

I'm brand new to the game and still figuring it all out.

So far I've only made simple to-camera "content" to promote my club nights on Instagram. But I've got a more involved project on the cards and I need to figure out how to do it.

I'm sure a few Ilxors must have been involved in making audio-visual films at some point. So this is a general-purpose thread for questions and discussion

To kick things off, my debut project is to make a film about my family in time for my Dad's birthday in August.

I've got loads of digital footage - old home videos, Super 8 footage, WhatsApp vids etc. I really just want to edit these together and maybe have some fun cuts and voiceovers etc. But I also want to use this as a jumping-off point to learn video editing. So in the first instance, I'm wondering what the best application to use might be.

The cheapest option would be to use iMovie, which I understand is quite versatile once you know what you're doing. I've found it a bit of a fiddle so far though, but I'm sure this is just due to my own lack of knowledge.

Alternatively, I could just bite the bullet and learn to use Adobe Premiere, Final Cut or new-kid-on-the-block DaVinci Resolve. I'm looking into the possibility of starting off on trial or lite version of one of these. I understand they all have their pros and cons though.

This is a fairly simple, beginner project. But I figure if I'm going to do this, I'd like to do it properly really. Any tips or suggestions welcome!

I use Vegas Pro (formerly Sony Vegas), it has some weird limitations but the timeline-based view is very comfortable after years working with Adobe Audition - and as with every bit of AV software, best to get an edition from around ten years ago or just before it became a subscription based service, there has been a major enshittening since then for almost everything. if you wanted to make tiktoks or w/e then capcut would be a much better choice, but you almost certainly don't want those novelty effects/transitions so there's no need.

I edit for work sometimes - at a sort of medium proficiency level I guess, i mainly focus on story and vibe and know enough technical stuff to stay out of trouble and ask the right questions if i know I don’t know something!

this is using premiere pro, which i have exclusively used for the last 10 years so am unhelpfully unable to compare to any other option other than FCP7 and ancient Avid builds - but it is easy and fast to use and pretty stable these days - it is also very capable at working with media from different sources - which probably they all are these days?

I have Final Cut Pro (and could download Premiere Pro if I wanted as I have an all-in-one Adobe subscription) but I think you can probably do all you need to do in iMovie. It's pretty intuitive; drag all the clips into the application, arrange them on a timeline, edit with the mouse.

i've been working in davinci resolve a lot because i've been shooting at night in raw and color correcting after the fact, these are things you can't really do in imovie. unfortunately i find davinci resolve maddening but i'm sure if i had more discipline i could make things easier for myself