Ask HN: A Decent Video Editing solution for a small Kickstarter project?

[cupcake-unicorn]

I'm helping a friend of mine with a small Kickstarter project. I've never really needed to cut together any serious videos, but I have resorted to something ridiculous like Windows Movie Maker when the need has come up, just to have an easy solution.

The problem is that I feel like I'm stuck between two worlds. On one hand, there are a ton of souped up, crazy video editing solutions that are overkill for me and would take too long to figure out how to do simple things. For example, was just looking into doing a simple text overlay in Blender/VirtualDub, and spent hours fiddling with things.

On the other side of the spectrum, there's a lot of really trashy options that range from pretty embarrassing to totally inappropriate for this project.

I feel like there's something I'm missing. I searched for ages and just couldn't find something the felt like the right fit. The closest was an app called PhotoFilmStrip, but that would only handle the pan and zoom, and I'd want some other (tasteful!) text, overlays, transitions, etc.

I don't have a Mac so no Mac apps, but anything else (Linux, etc.) is fair game. I feel like I often can find real gems on here that I can't find by searching so I hope I'll get lucky here. Thanks.

[danwolff]

You could use Kdenlive, "a free and open-source video editor for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD" [1] [2].

[1]http://www.kdenlive.org [2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eHEAfNFJ0k

[cupcake-unicorn → danwolff]

I did look into that, and it seemed to fit into the "overkill" category for me, although I didn't try it first hand since at the time I didn't have access to a Linux box.

There seem to be a lot of editors like that, and the high end ones, that are really for editing together actual short films, movies, etc. The fancy non-linear editors have so many bells and whistles that I get overwhelmed and bogged down in features. I have the kind of personality that I would start tweaking the video forever if I did something like this, and video editing isn't really something that I want to put a ton of research into or learn.

I'm looking for something that's geared towards making simple videos to showcase pictures, text, and videos of the person in charge of the Kickstarter cut in between. I'm certainly not making a movie, and like I said, there are apps that can do everything I want and more, but I really don't want to spend hours trying to do something simple. While the number of trashy Youtube videos generally outweighs the good ones, I'm sometimes surprised at the quality of ones by people just doing something like a makeup tutorial that don't really seem like they have much of a technical or artistic background. There's got to be something I'm missing.