I’m a total noob in terms of video editing/manipulation. I use both PC and Mac about equally.
Have been doing self-swim videos, pretty limited, as they’re only one view head-on, but they’re helpful.
The way they are captured, the image is upside-down, so I have to rotate it 180 degrees to have it look correct.
I also like to trim it so only the few seconds of useful views are included.
Right now I’m doing it on a PC using a janky but free method - I used the Windows Video Editor to rotate the video 180 degrees (which is itself annoying you have to make a project, then rotate, then export) and then I open that rotated video in Windows Photor Editor which allows you to trim videos to the section you want to keep.
I’d rather have one piece of software that I could do both with very easily, and in addition, do things like add lines, text, and slomo clips.
I’d prefer it to be <$50 if possible, just because I’m not doing pro-am video editing here, but if it’s a great piece of software, I’ll pay up.
I have thousands of hours of completely boring and useless swim videos that I edit and post with a degree of regularity. I’m using Adobe Premier Elements on a PC. I can’t recall what I paid, but it was worth it for me. It has a pretty handy “here is how to do this you idiot” feature that guides me through various features. I can take a 90 minute continuous swim video (that is broken into 8 minute files) and edit it down to a 3-5 minute video in about 15-20 minutes. The software can do all of the things you describe very quickly and easily. It was a very quick learn on the software with the guided features.
If you are super bored, you can watch my boring swim videos on You Tube. You will see from my view count that there is little demand for boring swim videos.
Hah. I guarantee my swim videos are more boring that yours. But mine are definitely super useful - underwater pool shots for technique on a regular basis are super useful for technique troubleshooting, any time.
OWS videos are something else though, not sure how I’d find those particularly useful for improving technique due to all the motion, and poor underwater visibility.
Any tips on how to get the most out of it? I’ve been using it on my iPad and it’s fairly clunky (though that could be my process).
My process is as follows
-plug GoPro into usb wall outlet to start cloud upload of swim footage (this takes several hours)
-open Quik app on iPad and download video from Cloud to App (I’ve found that edits cannot be made unless downloaded and this takes an additional few hours and often has errors for videos 40min +)
-in-app editing seems to only support single trimming and not cutting out several segments and combining the relevant ones. For reference, I keep the GoPro stationary either on the side of the pool or at one end of the lane so there’s typically 80% of nothing that I need to cut out to get to the actual footage.
I’m fairly certain my process is suboptimal and I’m very early in my swimming journey so would appreciate any tips on how to get better!
I’d also see if your camera can flip the recording natively. Would save some time and (I believe) technically improve the quality of the recording (remove a second lossy compression step). Most action cams seem to have that option since upside down mounting is pretty common.