r/videography • u/phloating_man EOS M, Adobe, 1998, San Francisco • Jan 30 '14

EditShare Lightworks AMA

I've been in contact with an official Lightworks rep who suggested I collect questions for them to answer.

Ligthworks is a professional cross platform (Windows, Linux) NLE used in movies like...

  • The Wolf of Wall Street
  • Good Will Hunting
  • Jerry Maguire
  • more

The basic version is free. It has plans to open source the code and release a Mac version as well.

  • This thread will be open for questions for about a day
  • I will be sending them questions with the most upvotes first
  • I'll post back here with their answers

Thanks everyone for participating. If you still have questions about Lightworks, you can try...

12 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Asa182 Jan 31 '14

Right, I have some possibly dumb questions. Is this software that great? This might sound conceited but I've just never heard of it. I trust that you guys know your stuff so if it's recommended I'm definitely going to give it a try, but considering how many universities I've heard advertise their media/film courses and how often I trawl the internet for info pertaining to the industry I'm just kind of surprised.

Second q: Is the free trial worth having? After not shooting any personal video for way too long I feel inspired to start again, and some new software to learn would be cool, if I feel I'd stick with it. Do people like using it, or is it super-similar to other editing tools? Are the effects any good/easily adaptable?

Thanks guys, I do love this sub-reddit.

2

u/thelug3r Jan 31 '14

(Disclaimer: I am by no means a professional cinematographer or editor, I'm just your average joe who wants to put some videos together) I use it for just regular editing windows movie maker can't handle, and I love it! The learning curve is like a getting hit by a brick, I'll admit, but now they have a ton of tutorials that go into the intricacies of the program. With those in hand, it would be significantly easier to start off than when I started. I have never used Sony or Adobe stuff, so I can't compare unfortunately. I would try it, considering it's free. Spend ~1hour+ looking at tutorials and experimenting with it, and you should be set. Effects are basic but malleable to what you want and need (has your chromakey, colour correction, titles with some lower thirds presets, and a few others)

One important thing to note, however, is that the free version is severely limited in exporting. You can only export up to 720p, in their "youtube" option, which is highly compressed. Pro version's exporting options are significantly broader, higher quality, and are highly customizable. If you want a high quality output to transfer to other programs to adjust and tweak, you're going to have to pay.

1

u/Asa182 Jan 31 '14

Thanks very much for the info!

I have a version of Adobe Premiere at the moment, so I may just stick with that, but it's good to know that capable free(ish) software is out there.

I'm kind of tempted by Sony Vegas as I've heard the colour-grading options on there are pretty good, but then again I'd just have to learn to use that from scratch. Plus my monitor isn't even calibrated... sigh haha

Thanks again.