Update 12/3 - after consistently using it I find Video Pro X11 to still be damn solid. I have since figured out basic effects in it as well as using its render queue. Its a steal!

This is posted with the blessing of /u/Jerith-

I recently picked up the newest Humble Bundle for Video Production, mainly because I had been using a copy of Adobe Premier 2015 for my videos.

Now, some background on my Rig so you can get an idea of where I started

• i7 4770k CPU 3.5 GHZ
• 16gb DDR3 Ram
• GTX 970 4gb GPU

So not the most beast of a rig but a decent machine.

Rendering in Adobe Premiere would use 99% of CPU generally, fluctuating down to 90% if I was lucky. It would take around 30m to an Hour for around 25 minutes of footage.

With this new bundle I saw a shot for me to try getting something, well, current.

It took a bit of getting used to. Video Pro X11 is basically Premiere, with some differences. For instance, I record in OBS for my videos with one audio channel for the game, and one for my mic. Importing into Premiere would show BOTH audio channels. But Video Pro X11 didnt...till I use the "Extract Audio" command in the software. I found that odd but it worked well enough.

Timeline editing was roughly the same as well. The "split" tool was under a context menu but I did eventually find it. About the only thing right now I cannot do in Video Pro X11 is straight Text Objects. I can do Title Effects (to create scrolling text and whatnot) but cant do what I used to do, which is color each line differently or apply different fonts / ect to text.

But the biggest change?

Rendering.

So I rendered 2 videos using it today. I started with MPEG4 as the codec. I had to adjust the output bitrate manually thru the options because it instantly set the bitrate of the video down to 6k average and 8k max. My recording footage bitrate is around 50k apparently soooo this was a big loss of quality. I was able to manually push it to 12k average 15k max which fixed it.

But the render time, no joke, was 3 hours! For 25 minutes of footage! Granted, it only used about 40% to 50% of my CPU to render, and didnt even touch my GPU. I was actually able to play World of Warcraft WHILE RENDERING without my CPU going above 75%.

Once Vid 1 was done, I went to do a second, and I noticed a "HEVC" codec. I had no idea what this was, so I did a bit of googling, and its basically the upgraded version of MPEG4. Youtube DOES support HEVC by the way per their help and support site so I figured I would give that a shot.

By default, the HEVC codec set the bitrate average output to 15k, and the max to 18k. No adjustment needed so that was good!

But it was how FAST it went. It rendered my 25 min vid in around 20 minutes, and used 15% of my CPU and 30% of GPU. Turns out HEVC was able to use my GPU for some hardware encoding!

This was a major upgrade for me. Video Pro X11 took me about 2 hours to figure out as its very similar in style to Premiere. And since I never use most of the Adobe stuff like After Effects it was PERFECT for me. Also the normal price for Video Pro X11 is like $400 so gettin it for $25 was a no brainer.

Hopefully my experience will help you all decide if this is a good upgrade for you or not.