Video editing is one of the more complex creator tasks, especially if you’re not a professional. I struggled to use Adobe Premiere Elements for years before I gave Clipchamp a shot, and this free, web-based video editor immediately impressed thanks to its incredible combination of ease of use, power, and flexibility.
But in keeping with my way of doing things–in this case, testing alternatives to software I rely on even when it works just fine-I thought I would compare the Clipchamp video editing experience with that of FilmCraft, the recently released vibe-coded clone of Adobe Premiere. And because I just used Clipchamp to create and publish a video on the Eternal Spring channel on YouTube that my wife and I maintain, I used the same assets and tried to create the same video again in Filmcraft.
So let’s start with those assets.
A typical video editing experience
When I post an Eternal Spring video to YouTube, I have to make and/or assemble the following assets in addition to the raw video footage:
A graphical title card graphic that appears as the video starts. This is often a solid color with the all-caps Eternal Spring logo in white, but in recent videos (including this one) I’ve used a photo background instead.
A title graphic that appears on-screen after the title card that matches the title of the video. This is created using a template I made in Affinity: The text of the title uses my stretched out custom Eternal Spring font and the graphic is saved as a transparent PNG.
A watermark graphic that appears on-screen in the lower left corner after the title card and for the duration of the video. This is currently our little heads in cartoon form with “CDMX” (for Ciudad de Mexico City).
Intro music that I obtained from the YouTube Studio audio library (it’s free and license-free) and edited down to 5 seconds. This typically just appears at the beginning of the video and fades in and out with the title card.
A graphic that displays our Instagram accounts on-screen at some point during each video.
A “Subscribe” animation that pops up on-screen at some point during each video and requires a green screen effect so it’s transparent.
The video I posted recently to Eternal Spring is about as simple as they come. After editing my title card and title graphics for this video, I only needed a few additional assets: Two short videos I took using a drone and some background music (because the drone doesn’t record audio).
For the background music, I searched the YouTube Studio audio library for music tagged with “Mexico,” “Mexican,” and “Mexico City.” And while I did find one song that was OK, YouTube Studio now has a Creator Music feature that uses AI to generate music that’s designed to be played repeatedly in a loop if needed. So I used that, telling it I wanted something Mexico, bright, and cheerful, and it spit out four music clips, one of which felt right…
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