Total newbie here, zero experience with video editing. But looking to shoot/post some videos, nothing fancy, but would like to add a counter, speed up the time, maybe combine 2 videos to make 1 side-by-side comparison, etc. Something like Bjorn Nyland did with the Supercharging video comparisons : Any recommendations? (I only have a Windows computer - no Mac) Thank you!
Adobe Premiere Video Editing is a sufficiently difficult to learn process - you really want to do that only once. Adobe Premiere has the highest chance of still being around in 10 years. Premiere Elements is probably fine for most use cases, and cheaper than Pro.
That is actually some pretty fancy stuff. With the proliferation of Youtube folks assume this stuff is easy, but it takes awhile to learn and is non-trivial. I'd suggest Premiere as well.
What I don't like about Adobe is the cloud approach - for a software I am using rather infrequently I don't want to be tied to pay an annual subscription for. I use Video Pad, but am thinking about Camtasia.
Premiere Elements is not a subscription - it's once off. But even for the subscription stuff, if you use it very infrequently, you can just subscribe to the monthly plan, use it for a while, then cancel and renew when you need it again.
I use Premiere Elements 13: https://amzn.to/2KQ1ytc, an older version, but it's still available for $66 and it meets my needs.
This won't help at the moment but I've been switching over to the Affinity products by Serif as they have become available. Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives are available now. Next up is desktop publishing and then video editing: Affinity - Professional creative software I've used Adobe products for years but the current pricing and cloud model doesn't appeal to me.
I use Windows Movie Maker 2.6 for all my videos. I don't do any fancy editing, so I never needed anything else. But video shot on my camera outputs in .mp4, so I have to run it through mpeg streamclip to convert it to an .avi file for MM 2.6 . I also use Streamyard for videos that go straight to my YouTube channel without editing. It works very well even in the free version.