Heya all! Last week, I talked about Windows 11 and all of its quirks. Today, let’s talk about what may, or may not, be a benefit of Windows 11 for photographers/videographers. Let’s get to some editing!
What’s New?
To start off, this is not the same editor as in Windows 10… Although that is still available as the unchanged primary editor in Windows 11, Clipchamp is another option shipped with Windows.
I’m going to give a bit of backstory on the editor:
- Clipchamp is an editor startup from 2013.
- The benefit of Clipchamp is it frees up the GPU to its fullest extent for video rendering.
- Clipchamp was bought by Microsoft back in September (2021) and was rumoured to be integrated into Windows 11 Photos (it wasn’t 😐).
This is it!
So, what is in this new video editor? Where do I find it? Is it even good?! I’ll start with the where:
You will likely find htis editor right in the start menu, and if you click on it for the first time, it may need to download.
After you go through the login process (and possible download), you will be brought here, to the home page:
It has a similar layout to Kapwing, which I have used in the past for link sharing. As you can see, it is a simple layout and so, we cannot set our expectations too high.
Now, I just opened up a new project, and this is what I have:
The layout is nice and seem to have a lot more depth than the basic Windows 10 video editor.
We have all of the features on this sidebar here:
The layout is simple and intuitive, which is nice! How does it all perform though?
Exploring while Editing:
I am going to walk through a simple video edit and look at what I can do in the editor!
I have my first few clips imported and am ready to see what I can do with them!
You can see above that we have some options, but I want to go straight to the speed and slow this down.
Initial impressions here: Oh no!! There are no key frames! 😭
Yeah, not a fan of that…
I did slow this down, but had to split the clip, so I could go from normal speed down to slow. This is the clip which I unfortunately had to split into 5.
Surprisingly, just by having them at slightly different speeds on the slider, it is decently smooth. There doesn’t seem to be big jumps between speeds, which is a plus! (sadly they are still there 😐).
I want the next scene to introduce music, so I’ll go find some…
Found one!
I now have the music inserted and put in the next clip!
I want to boost the brightness a bit, and now you get to see the colour adjustment panel!
I just did a slight boost on the sliders.
Also, quick rewind, I went back to get a transition in-between the first recording and second.
As you can see above, I have a blur transition. There are a decent number of transitions and unless you want a direct cut, these are necessary due to the lack of key framing or add-ons.
Let’s now look at my next clip:
I want to add a slight bit of stabilization to that. It isn’t possible. I checked online and it is on a future update bored of suggestions, but right now I have no alternative without slowing down. The footage is only a tiny bit shaky, so I’ll just live with it. I did have to have a varying brightness in this clip (because of my shadow) and, again, without key framing this is super painful. This is what my timeline ended up looking like for this clip.
I added a transition and now it is time to look at the next clip! I imported it and being that it had more blue tones, I tried out a simple filter:
I bumped it up some more with the colour sliders:
I am trying to match up the music to the video as much as possible, so I downloaded a stock footage lens leak to fill the space.
After this, I went wild and kinda sped through the rest of the edit! For the following clip, I used that same “indoors” filter since I liked the warm tones that it added!
For this kind of editing, I have almost reached the extent of this editor’s capabilities.
Finalizing the Edit:
Now, let’s finalize this edit! I want to end with the usual “thanks for watching” text.
I used this cool template that blew in like smoke. I think it looks cool!
Finally, I added the end card!
I have the insane idea to export it multiple times… I guess we will see…
Oh, OH! I just went to export, and it only allows 480p unless you pay! 😐 I guess the export times won’t be long. 😂
That is pretty infuriating. At least it’ll only take a few minutes to export.
I have to say that this progress tracker in the export is nice.
Now that it is exported, it is no surprise that 480p looks just as horrible as it sounds.
View Video:
If you want to view the super low quality video, feel free at this Clipchamp Share link:
Oh wait, the share link didn’t work properly 🤦♂️.
Here is the YouTube link (since I can’t use Clipchamp 😐):
https://youtu.be/inJz5X2G42M
Okay, I decided that it would be funny to upload to Kapwing. Here is the Kapwing link (a Clipchamp competitor). This one is in 720p, so it should be better quality than YT and Clipchamp 😂!
https://kapwi.ng/c/MNybMtZ30q
Conclusion:
Overall, this seemed like a decent editor at first. The 480p is terrible though. Please, at the extreme, LEAST 720p. It doesn’t help that all those “smooth” cuts in the editor rendered extremely poorly. It is really ashame, because 720p export would have had me shaking my head a bit, but 480p. No, not in 2021.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post! If you are looking to Windows 11 for Photo/Video, performance in Photoshop & Premiere are way better than in the past, but preinstalled editing options are not great and the Windows 10 (Microsoft built) editors deserve an upgrade 6 years on.
Thanks for reading, see you next week!
-Digital Wonders & Smiles
Digital Wonders and Smiles 