Hi

12 year old son is into making short films. Has Sony Videocamera camera and goes to film club. He’s been using Windows Moviemaker up to now but wants something better.

What should we go for? He’s looking at an Adobe product for £70 so thats ballpark.

Many thanks in advance

Have a look at Hitfilm. The Pro version is big, fancy and has all the bells and whistles but is pricey, but the Express version is free for all the basics with the option to buy add-on effects packs and extra. I’ve been using it for some fairly basic bits recently and it works well, isn’t to tricky to learn and seems a lot more powerful that I will probably ever need.

Power Director is good. Like Windows movie maker but with more features

Cheers. Will have a look

Davinci Resolve.

Resolve is great but it puts huge demands on a system compared to FCPx or premiere, forget working on native files if your machine isn’t a fast workstation with a raid and a fancy card.

Adobe Premiere Elements? Is that an educational deal? If so probably a very good price (check it’s not the subscription/creative cloud monthly price)
As for performance using Prem Pro (the more bells and whistles version) I can edit 1080 on an old i3 laptop with 8gb Ram just about though it’s a bit slow. Be aware of transfering licenses too.
Also what does the flim club reccomend? Each tool will work a bit differently in the end and takes learning – what do they have/use?

If you have a recent iPad, don’t doscount doing it all in iMovie on there…

Rachel

Thanks very much. Will ask the film club what they use. He said it might be Lightbox but that looked like something different to me. Thanks all

My usual leftfield answer just in case you’re a geek and use Linux. Kdenlive is VERY good for a freebie and not too hard to learn.