Testing out LWKS as Premiere replacement

[Oliver Peters]

I’m never personally driven Lightworks, but have been involved in a number of projects that were cut on Lightworks. I’ve also been keeping tabs on them in recent times, but honestly, I don’t have the time or inclination to jump onto yet another piece of software without a local client base.

That being said, Lightworks’ biggest strength has always been in cutting dialogue-driven material like dramatic films. Editors who use it there praise the trimming methods for editing dialogue overlaps. So, with that in mind, I can easily see why effects would feel a bit “cobbled on”. However, that’s not too much different from Media Composer, I suppose. Nevertheless, it’s always good to have options.

Bring back EMC2! 😉

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

[Morten Ranmar] “LWKS is definitely not for me – but would really like to hear others experiences in this arena…”

Some of the most memorable edits I’ve ever made, was made on the old Lightworks. The controller (Console) itself was a dream to work on with the software (DOS!!!), and you really felt like a film editor. I used it mainly for documentary editing in the mid 1990’s at a BBC department working with new and upcoming directors – we had to turn around 10-30 minutes of final edited programs a day with audio mix – which was a real joy to do on the system. + there was many fond hours spent waging bets on which shark would make it first to the botton-left corner…

Sadly, and it is a BIG sadly, Tektronix was the first to buy them, and it has since been through a number of different owners, who each have not managed to return it to its glory days – some have IMHO helped the demise. Current owner have tried, but we gave up our paid subscription after a year as it just didn’t deliver fixes and improved functionality in comparison to for example PPro. It wasn’t helped by their online magazine being a bit too liberal about reporting on the competitions’ NLE’s…

However, if Lightworks at the time have had the same budget and marketing people that Avid had, I’m sure that the world of NLE would have looked very different today.

But sadly they didn’t – and the new owner does not appear to have the resources to break back into the market and the Lightworks Controller, even if made to work with other systems, are out of financial reach for most people + strong competition from other hard-ware and software suppliers in that field.

Nevertheless, if someone asked me to edit a feature length film tomorrow (6 months+), I would seriously consider it for the controller interface alone. Anything else to edit, no.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[David Mathis]

I have not used Premiere since the inception of subscription only though Photoshop I did subscribe to. Not sure about Lightworks, it looks nice but if Resolve 12 lives up to its promise, my eyes are on it as an alternative. I can do without video tracks but audio tracks will be of benefit. I love the trimming and keyframing functionality in Resolve, something FCP can improve on. On the other hand, connected clips are nice to have and can easily be disabled.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Morten Ranmar] “Yesterday I discovered that LWKS is indeed available for Mac. Wonder why this has passed by in silence – but maybe it is due to the alienating way this software is designed…
“

There have been a couple of threads about it here since the Mac version came out last year, but for reasons like you stated and Oliver stated no one seems to have really picked it up and seriously played with it. I had been follow LWKS for years waiting for the Mac version to come out but besides a few basic tutorial I haven’t touched it in the last 12 months.

[Jp Pelc]

I haven’t used it myself, but I have a protigé who uses it. He regularly asks me how to do various tasks involving anything from scaling and positioning to opacity changes to motion tracking to masking effects to audio sweetening. I usually tell him how I do things in Premiere and tell him I assume LW has similar features, but it often does not. It seems like a lot of basic features are missing. So I am not impressed from what I hear

[Scott Witthaus]

[Oliver Peters] “Bring back EMC2!”

Ah yes, that brings back memories. I can never forget that pop-up saying something like “Mount your optical drive”. Now THAT was an edit system! 😉

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter