Over Christmas I bought a laptop. At my day job, it's all Dells, mostly Latitudes, and because I'm so used to them, and they are business grade and thus pretty reliable, I used them at home too. But I don't buy them new, whoa, too expensive! So I buy all the computers in my household through in online auctions. I watch and wait for a lot of ex-company fleet Dell Latitudes, and then I bid on the best one(s). My experience has been that most people feel "safe" to buy one of the mid range ones, and not many aim for the best one. Well I "went crazy" and won the best one in the lot for $AUD508 (2024) - it is a 12th gen i7 with 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe, 15" touch screen and even has an MX550 graphics card, not that I play games on it...but maybe that will help with encoding video and audio. In comparison, there were quite a few 10th gen 17, 16GB RAM, 512 NVMe, only onboard graphics...and they went for around $400 each. To me that extra $100 is well spent!
I stuck with Windows 10, I'm just not ready for Windows 11 even though there are plenty of computers at my day job with it. Interestingly it was a painful install process, because the computer was too new (only 1.5 years old) and didn't have any internet connectivity drivers! I had to do some hackery to get it on the network to complete the installation. But now, wow, so fast! A Reaper audio takes less than a third the time!
Now I'm not a upgrade/sync settings sort of guy, I am a start from scratch every time. It makes the initial install take a bit longer, but you only put on what you need. After several years with a computer you have quite often filled it with stuff you never use. I will put on my usual software, but even then, I will look at upgrading and changing at the same time.
When it came to my video editing software, Power Director, I was still on version 16 which is a long time ago. I looked it up and I could get a perpetual license for around $AUD180 (2024) which I found a little steep. If they could have kept it under $100 I would have jumped in. Instead I looked around - one of the guys at work mentioned "Shotcut" which is an open source video editor, I looked it up.
One of the issues I have with video editing is that waaay back in the 90's I learnt "Ulead Studio", and understood the workflow quite well. When I later looked at Adobe and the other big players, the workflow was different and I really disliked it. Power Director was the closest in operation, hence I went with that.
Shotcut seemed to be similarly built, the only thing the internet seemed to be saying was "steep learning curve". I decided to see how I would go on my latest video for YouTube.
Straight out the gate it had a very familiar style of operation, so far so good. Because my videos are pretty straight forward, just text, fades, crop and resize, audio substitution, it should be easy. And it was! Armed with a chatbot, I finished the video and maybe only spent an hour getting used to the process and workflow. Some of it, particularly "Filters", is better than Power Director - it flows more like Reaper. I really appreciated that.
As for steep learning curve, well, no. I found it easy to learn and navigate, only a few foreign concepts. I took notes while learning, so next video should be just as fast as if I was using my trusty old software.
I was slightly disappointed it was unable to use my fancy Nvidia graphics card, it was doing most things on the main CPU, but it was using a lot of cores. And with the new laptop it was fast enough, around 5-6 mins to render a 3 minute video. I can live with that. Especially at that price.
Thanks Shotcut devs!
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