非线性编辑器的买方指南

The first time I saw an NLE -- a nonlinear editing software package -- I’d just left film school and had started my first job. 这是一个简单的产品, 真正的魔法, which someone in my military public affairs office showed off. 还有另一个新产品, CoSA After Effects, these two tools were a welcome sight for someone tired of chasing down two frames of celluloid on the cutting room floor.

快进几年, and both products had become part of the Adobe stable of tools: Real Magic became Premiere, After Effects变成, 好吧, Adobe After Effects.

In the intervening years since I first saw Real Magic, I've used tools from a wide swath of the industry: Adobe, 苹果, 狂热的, 老人星, 快, Macromedia, 100年媒体, NewTek, 半径, 声波铸造, 索尼, SuperMac, 中间还有一些. Some of these tools attempt to be all-in-one solutions -- think bundles and suites -- while others tend to focus on just one area of expertise.

Rather than get into what can almost be called a religious debate, 类似于Mac vs . PC，或者可口可乐vs .百事可乐, I’m going to provide a few decision points to ponder when it comes to choosing the right tool for the right project. 注意，我说的不是正确的工具. 有多少工作流就有多少工作流, the time is right to consider how much to beef up your toolbox before determining which editing interface will serve you best.

你会在哪里编辑?

We've traditionally had to choose between speed and portability, with the desktop computer and laptop being the respective hardware platform on which these two choices rest. Yet even today's thinnest laptop -- be it a Windows 8 ultrabook or a MacBook Air -- possesses a number of key features that make portability a real option for about 90% of all editing projects.

For those projects requiring significant compositing, whether in a stand-alone motion software tool or directly within the NLE timeline, the key factor to consider in portable hardware is the graphics card (GPU). 今天的许多nle都支持gpu, meaning that the actual rendering of multiple layers of video no longer occurs until a timeline is exported to a single, 平面线性视频文件. 而不是, the GPU renders as many layers as it can at one time -- including effects applied to discrete layers -- to provide a real-time representation for the editor to use for decision-making. Some GPU-accelerated tools also have the option of scaling back resolution, 为了保持时间的一致性, 这在便携式设备上很方便.

云计算怎么样??

The secondary question that's arisen in the last 2 years, but with a heri标签e more than a decade in the making, is whether the project will be edited in the cloud or on the local machine.

I remember talking to a company almost 12 years ago that had a patented process for online video editing collaboration -- if you were willing to pay $750,000元/座. 在过去的两年里, 虽然, a number of online tools have popped up that offer the ability to trim, 标签, 段, 拼接, 目录, 评论, 并证明你的基本在线视频编辑.

Some editors choose this for their rough cut -- or a "paper edit," as we used to call it -- while others use it for crash editing and output to a streaming format.

A few solutions are now beginning to integrate this online clip storage and collaboration with the desktop- or laptop-based NLE product. It's a normal progression to use the tool you're most comfortable with, leveraging the cloud to store and share both the raw video clips and in-progress timelines.

DASH或Flash?

I told the Sourcebook editors that I wouldn't mention a single company's product, save for the historical mention at the top of the page, but I couldn't resist the rhyming question from these two 好吧-known streaming output solutions.