Test Driving and Loving Lightworks

Well, with Adobe’s recent move to the Cloud, of which I’m too distrusting to like, I thought it was time to look for alternatives.

I’ve just been using a friend’s CS6 because I’ve not yet had the money to invest in my own system, which turned out to be for the best!

I had downloaded Lightworks previously but didn’t start using it because it’s not completely intuitive, and I hadn’t watched the tutorials, and just set it aside.

Now I’m actually running their latest Beta version, with some success. Still have a lot to learn, but just watching the tutorials made me a lot more optimistic about editing. I never quite realized how daunting editing with Premiere could feel in comparison with something as simple as Lightworks. The Mark and Park feature is fantastic.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all the bells and whistles in CS6 (including the full-full-screen mode), but Lightworks starts up so much quicker and is way quicker to pull of an edit. I love the quick and easy way to do trim edits. That was always one of the more annoying aspects of cutting in Premiere – having to unjoin audio and video so you could overlap audio from one clip to the next, etc.

I feel quite invigorated about editing my feature, Amnesia!

This new NLE, coupled with what I hope to be a new and easier way to organize my clips (a bin for each scene, plus the ability to create a copy of certain clips for my trailer) and I’m feeling like it may not take me as long to cut it as it would in Premiere.

As an indie filmmaker here in Austin, you can’t argue with the price either! $60/year for the PRO version (which gives you a few more native codecs and maybe a couple extra features)… well worth it!

I can’t wait to buy my Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera, and start using it with Lightworks, and hopefully increase my creative output a lot!

Thanks to the developers and the folks over at the Lightworks’s forums for quick and helpful support!

No matter what system you cut on, you should minimally check out their tutorials… Lightworks is not only fast and easy (once you know it), it’s also extensible and has been used on a lot of major motion pictures!

Here you can find a bunch of “plugins” for Lightworks (user effects as they’re called). Follow ALL the instructions in red at the top of the post to add them to Lightworks:

http://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=7&id=9259&Itemid=81

If I had the authority, I would certainly name Lightworks as THE indie NLE!

Val Gameiro
Writer, Director, Filmmaker
Austin, Texas