[Bill Celnick]

I’ve used mainly Premiere Pro and its earlier versions for over 20 years, and DaVinci Resolve for about a year. Once I got comfortable with Resolve, the editing was easy enough, and less buggy then each new release of Premiere, and it’s nice not to have to pay Adobe monthly. So, my advice would be Resolve over Premiere.

Only thing that keeps me on Premiere is that I know it reflexively, and have invested in some plugins that I don’t want to buy again.

[Bill Celnick]

I fully agree with Mad’s suggestion of the Ashley Kennedy course on LinkedIn Learning.

I learned Premiere back in the late 1990s from self teaching and CD based tutorials of the day, but I took a 10 year detour to FCP 7, and when I returned to Premiere a few years ago I found that I needed to refresh my memory, and I spend a couple of days taking her class – I learned so much.

Because of changes with new releases and the fact that I really use the tip of the iceberg in most apps, I’ll probably take her most recent class this winter to refresh my knowledge. I’m also using Resolve, and this is what I expect to be my main editing app down the line.

[Bill Celnick]

sorry for the late reply…vaguely recall a few years back Mercalli did have a Mac version, but it was a stand-alone application, not a plug-in, and it wouldn’t work with the M1 chips when they were released. Things may have changed.

[Bill Celnick]

agree that any real helpful suggestion would require seeing exactly what you’re working with, but, lets assume that some of this footage was okay – I might try first to use all of this video that was good, and then have to make a gut decision on each of the unstable shots – with all the flaws is the unstable footage more or less interesting then the wide shot you mentioned?

I’ve used Warp Stabilizer, Mercalli, and DaVinci Resolve at times to stabilize – with Mercalli you can try different options, maybe you can make just enough of your shots good enough to use.

[Bill Celnick]

I’d also suggest transcoding those Zoom files to ProRes before the edit, and see if that makes a difference.

[Bill Celnick]

Agreed – I record all of my narration via Audition and import back into Premiere as a wav as well.

I think I did it this way since before Premiere had VO capabilities and saw no need to change my process.

[Bill Celnick]

I’m running Premiere (and Resolve) on an even less powerful computer (2021 Mac Mini, 16GB Ram and M1 (not max or pro). I find that it handles 2 or 3 tracks of 4K video quite well.

I notice differences in performance when I use a San Disk SSD Extreme as my editing drive compared to my Samsung T7 SSD – don’t have the specs handy on the drives, but the performance is better with the Samsung – smoother timeline playback for sure.

[Bill Celnick]

Getting back to your original question on the M1 Mini – I bought one about 18 months ago – 1 TB internal SSD, 16 GB Ram, and I think it cost me about $1200.

I was able to handle 4K edits – using 4K clips in projects that ultimately were delivered in 1080p.
The mini was able to handle Premiere, but render and export times were very slow, and we had several crashes as we progressed. I should add that I use external drives – Samsung T7 SSD for both my source and output during the edit, and edited the original files, not proxies.

I’m a recent convert to DaVinci Resolve, just edited a wedding with 3 4K tracks in my timelines on the Mac Mini. It was flawless – no crashes, reasonable render times – so the hardware is quite capable – if not with Premiere then with Resolve. Also tried FCPX – just did not like it, but it handled the material.

I hope this helps.

Bill

[Bill Celnick]

Thanks for the advice, I agree fully that my first full edit on Resolve was indeed joyful compared to Premiere…and I replaced Photoshop with Photoshop Elements – it can do almost all of what I need to do. So far so good – haven’t fully gotten into Fusion yet.

[Bill Celnick]

There is / was freeware called CN Levelator, which I don’t think has been updated in about 10 years, but I still have it on my PC (Windows 10). You simply right click, and send your source file to Levelator and it evens everything out as the name suggests…afterwards I’ll run my file through Izotope to refine it even further. Results have been quite good.

Sorry to say that I tried to install it on a new Mac and I got an error message that the developer needed to update the app, so if your on a Mac it may not be an option.