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You're new to event video, but you know you have a knack for it.
You want to hit the ground running-even if its only a half-dozen events per year-but you need to watch your pennies as you go.
You can't commit $600+ to any one tool, but you're too ambitious and too quick a learner to start with a consumer tool that's functionally a dead end. You need software that's built for a pro, but sold at consumer-level pricing, with select feature reductions accounting for the difference. Enter the Pre-Pro NLE.
Way back in my college days we had things called distribution requirements. You had to take a certain number of classes in each of three disciplines: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. I always came up short in the natural sciences, and as I browsed the available Intro options in the various departments, I found that they fell into two categories: those designed for rising majors-future math professors, software developers, astrophysicists, and neuroscientists-and those geared to the needs and intellectual limitations of the non-science crowd. At their best, the latter gave you a stimulating introduction to the scientific principles that underpin your life, while the "real" science classes took a pre-professional approach, introducing you the science required for your future job. In short, they took two fundamentally different approaches to what at first glance might appear to be the same thing.
Video editing software is much the same way. Choosing the tool that's right for you depends on several things; two of the most important are where you're starting as an editor, and-even more important-where you're going.
In EMedia and EventDV, we've tended to describe what many publications call "consumer" NLEs as "entry-level" editing software. "Entry-level" is a useful term in some respects, since it does distinguish consumer-oriented products that are genuine timeline-based video editors (like Pinnacle Studio and Ulead VideoStudio) from "automatic" video software like muvee's autoProducer, which is fascinating from an application design perspective but doesn't leave much room for growth on the user's part. And entry-level does, at least, suggest some notion of upward mobility, advancing the aesthetic or technical accomplishment of your video work, if not its purpose (say, from hobbyist to professional, or from part-time/occasional/ departmental videographer to independent/full-time).