Clipchamp Saved the Day, and Now I’m Going to Keep Using It (Premium)

We interrupt our regular programming for something completely unexpected: this weekend, I became a Clipchamp user. To be fair, I had described it as a capable video editor when I went hands-on with the app over a year ago. So maybe the real question is, what took so long?

It’s hard to say. Maybe inertia. Maybe it’s that I spent more time than I wanted to in learning a product I had already paid for, Adobe Premiere Elements 2022, because my wife and I wanted to create a YouTube channel to document our experiences starting down a new path after we bought an apartment in Mexico City in early 2022. But the thing is, video editing is hard. Hard and time-consuming. And so having learned exactly what I needed to edit our videos consistently and efficiently using Premiere Elements, I had no reason to even consider moving on.

It’s all true. But there is a little bit more to it, I guess. Though I am a creator, broadly—I co-host or host three podcasts, after all—I am first and foremost a writer. I’ve been writing professionally about personal technology since 1994, and if and when the podcasts and the YouTube channel fall apart, I’ll still be plying away at my original love, writing. Video editing is a secondary, maybe even tertiary, thing for me. I just want to get in and out. It’s not my focus.

Tied this is a pet peeve of mine of which most Thurrott.com readers are fully aware. It makes me crazy when things work inconsistently or don’t work at all, and that is especially true of personal technology products and services. Anything that gets in my way, or causes me to lose focus or progress, sends me into a tailspin. I wrote about this unwelcome phenomenon a few months back when I had made spectacular progress towards publishing Windows Everywhere, my magnum opus, only to run into a brick wall of technical issues that ground my work to a screeching halt. But I experience this kind of issue all the time, in ways both big and small. It’s always frustrating. But it’s not clear whether it’s worse when it’s a product I understand really well—like Windows—or when it’s just a tool that I don’t love or care about but just need it occasionally to get something done.

This much is clear: Premiere Elements falls into that latter category, and it has, from time to time, prevented me from editing or publishing a clean, error-free video through no fault of my own. I don’t experience these problems every time I use the app—the unreliable nature of them is of course also maddening—just sometimes. And, I’m positive, on certain PCs. I’ve tried to troubleshoot whether these problems are related to the underlying hardware, and if perhaps some difference between hardware-accelerated and software rendering could possibly be the trigger. And I don’t really know. I just know that sometimes it works fine for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. And that this is the kind of thing that drives me away.

The issues I see fall into two major buckets, edit-time issues and export issues. Neither makes any sense, or is in any way predictable. On the editing side, I will sometimes inexplicably get ghost images in the timeline, and once that happens, I can’t fix it and have to scrap the project, and all my work, and start over from scratch. The export issues are even more maddening because this comes after all of the editing and then an often-lengthy export process: I check the video for errors and will sometimes have several seconds of video that just glitch with weird hazy colors, sometimes more than once per video. All you can do there, for the most part, is start the export over again and hope for the best. Often multiple times.

This past Thursday, we flew to Mexico City for a three-week trip, and I knew we’d be making some videos for the YouTube channel. Despite this, I forget an important side issue with using Premiere Elements: to prevent software piracy, Adobe requires you to enter a product key at install time and sign into your Adobe account, and then it only allows you to use the app on two PCs at a time. (You can sign out on one PC to open up a sign-in on another.) Because I use so many different PCs—I brought two loaner laptops on this trip so I can review them while we’re here, for example—I have to keep remembering to sign out of Premiere Elements on those PCs to which I’ve installed it. Otherwise, I have to contact Adobe support, hat in hand, and ask them to free up my license.

(Quick side note: I know many people disparage and ignore the Microsoft Store in Windows. But one of the huge advantages of that store is the liberal licensing of the apps it distributes. For example, I purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements in that store and have no issues installing and using it on every single PC I use, and I use a lot of PCs because I’m always reviewing them. If I had purchased Photoshop Elements directly from Adobe, as I had to do with Premiere Elements—that one is not in the Store—I would be dealing with the same licensing issue. And that would be a much bigger problem because I use Photoshop Elements every single day, not just occasionally.)

Anyway, I forgot to do that on this trip, the excuse being that the days leading up to a trip like this are hectic, and, again, video editing isn’t exactly top of mind. And so when we arrived and I went to edit a set of several short videos I recorded on my phone during the trip into a single montage—you can see the result here—I realized that I’d have to first install Premiere Elements on a PC and would most likely be contacting Adobe support for permission. And that was the first inkling of that all-too-common frustration I described above, that cessation of progress because I was sidelined by a problem that, in this case, actually was my own fault.

And so I installed Premiere Elements on one of the laptops I leave here in the Roma Norte apartment because the two review units I flew with are non-beefy thin and light computers with U-series processors and probably not ideal for video rendering. While that was happening, I used the otherwise wasted time to put together some of the ancillary assets I’d need for the video, like a thumbnail image and some titles, so I’d be ready to roll when the installation was done. And here we get the only good Adobe-related news I have to report in this story: when I entered my product key, it activated without any issues. Phew.

Now I have to discuss video editing for this to make sense, and I need to again reiterate that this isn’t a primary skill, so I’m probably going to use some incorrect terminology. Apologies to the experts in the audience.

Each time I make a video for our YouTube channel, I create a new project in Premiere Elements and then I import the assets I need. Some are pre-made, including a card with our “Eternal Spring” logo (I made 14 of these, each in its own color), the intro music that plays over that title card, a transparent text overlay displaying the name of the video, a transparent Eternal Spring logo overlay that appears over the body of the video in the lower right corner (sort of a watermark, I guess), a greenscreen “Subscribe to our channel” animation as you see on most YouTube videos that I acquired (i.e. did not create myself), and then usually one video file, recorded in Zoom, of my wife I and talking. Sometimes there are additional photos or videos too, which when used replace the video of my wife and me for a bit.

This montage was a bit different in that there was no Zoom video, but rather a set of short videos and photos I took on my phone during the trip to Mexico City: clips from our Uber ride to the airport, walking through the airport, boarding the plane, taking off, landing, and so on. The videos have sound and the photos do not, of course, so I would also need to take the additional step of fading out the audio in each video clip that appeared before a photo, to make it less jarring, and then fade in the audio of each video clip that appeared after a photo, same deal. The point of all this is that this video, while short, has a lot more pieces to it and a lot more editing work than usual. But it’s all work that I’m familiar with.

Piecing together each asset in the Premiere timeline was time-consuming and detail-oriented, but I got through it, previewing the results as I went. The segments I added included the title card, the first video clip with a video title overlay, the second video clip, the first photo, the third video clip, and … bam. It happened. When I added the next video clip, I started getting that glitchy effect I described before from which Premiere Elements cannot recover. I tried anyway, but nothing I did would fix the problem: there was a visual glitch in the fourth video clip that isn’t in the original file. And I did a test export, verifying that it was in the output too. I had to shit-can the project and start over.

Getting aggravated, I did so. And methodically imported all the assets and started laying out each piece in the timeline again in a new project. This time, I got further into it before it just happened again. I would have to kill this project too, and start over again.

Nope. I’d already wasted over an hour on what would be a roughly 3-minute video and I knew I couldn’t trust this app to work properly on this PC, so I declared defeat and started over. Literally: I then downloaded and installed Premiere Elements 2022 from Adobe on the second PC I leave in Mexico City. This one has a smaller screen, so it’s not as ideal for video editing as the first PC, but it also has discrete graphics, so maybe it would, um, be better for video editing. While that happened, I transferred all the assets I had created and downloaded from my phone to a USB key and then copied them all to the second PC so I could get up and running as quickly as possible.

The differences between the first PC (which has a 16-inch 4K+ display) and the second PC (which has a 14-inch Full HD+ display) are interesting. Adobe does a crap job of handling different display densities, in my opinion, and where Premiere Elements overcompensates for high DPI, making the app look big and childish on the first PC, it looks “correct” on the second PC, despite its smaller display, showing more of the timeline.

Anyway, I plodded through the same sequence of work for the third time, starting a new project, importing assets, and then laying them all out on the timeline as before, and previewing as I went. And this time … it worked. I got to the end and successfully created exactly the video I wanted. Maybe it really was the PC causing the issues I had before. Granted, it had taken almost two hours longer than I had wanted. But it was done. So I exported the video, which took several minutes. While this happened, I opened Chrome, which I use only for Eternal Spring, and clicked “Create” > “Upload video” on our channel’s home page in anticipation of uploading the final video to YouTube.

So naïve.

The exported video was just over 3 minutes long, but in testing it in VLC (which I use because the Media Player app in Windows 11 is horrifically slow), I saw that there was terrible video glitching at the 35-second mark, making the exported video unusable. WTF. I’ve seen this before, as you know, and so the only recourse was to try exporting it again because it usually exports without error after another try or two. Long story short, this didn’t work: I tried five more exports, and each had visual glitching somewhere in the video, sometimes more than once. I played around with Premiere’s settings, among other things, toggling off hardware-accelerated exporting. But nothing worked.

This I had not experienced before and now I was over two and a half hours into a task that should have taken less than 30 minutes (minus the Premiere Elements install time, which was on me). My morning, which I intended to be very productive, was disappearing. Shit.

It was in this dark moment that I knew I’d never use Premiere Elements again. But I still needed to get that video up, and my wife and I were planning to record a video later that day too. So I would have to figure something out quickly. I had two replacements in mind: DaVinci Resolve, which is free but very complex, and Clipchamp, which is also free (and comes with Windows 11), and very simple. So I started installing DaVinci Resolve on one of the review laptops, figuring I would at least experiment with it.

While that was happening, I had an idea: one of the exported videos had only one glitch, and it was towards the end of the video and lasted only a few seconds. So I could probably edit that out pretty easily. But I no longer trusted Premiere Elements, of course. And so I figured Clipchamp would be a good choice. I could import the exported video, edit out the glitch, and export it from there.

This worked wonderfully, and in opening Clipchamp, I was reminded of how delightful this simple yet powerful app is. And for a project like this one, it was especially simple. All I had was a single asset to import—that exported Premiere Elements video—and all I had to do was locate the glitch, split the video before it, split the video after it, remove the glitch, and then connect the two sides with a cross-dissolve transition.

And Clipchamp saved the day. It worked, it was easy, and it was quick. And the exported video was indistinguishable from what I would have done entirely in Clipchamp. Nice. So I uploaded it to YouTube and all as well. It was just three hours later than I wanted. And my morning was lost.

Mexico City is two hours behind our home in Pennsylvania, so we weren’t hungry yet, and I figured I had two more hours before (a late) lunch. And so I used this time trying to learn DaVinci Resolve, in effect wasting another two hours and guaranteeing I’d never get any real work (i.e. writing) done that day.

DaVinci Resolve is, as promised, a complex and arcane application. To learn it, I recreated the same video montage project I had just made since I was now painfully familiar with it. And here I will not bore you with the details. I spent enough time with DaVinci Resolve to know that I’d learn its ins and outs in time, but it was a struggle. This is a busy, busy app and there is lots to learn, even for someone like me who was pretty well acquainted with this process in another reasonably powerful app.

But I did run into one problem that I believe to be a showstopper. When it comes to video editing, one of the most basic tasks you can perform is what I did earlier with that glitchy exported video in Clipchamp: add a transition between two video clips (and/or other visual assets, like still photos). In DaVinci Resolve, there are a few ways to do this, but the simplest is to select the gap between two clips in the timeline, open the app’s Effects pane, display the pane’s Video Transitions view, and then drag the transition you want down to that gap. (I keep it simple and always use a cross-dissolve.) When it works correctly, this process is as simple in DaVinci Resolve as it is in other apps (once you figure out where the transitions are in the UI). But this app has a fatal flaw: this doesn’t always work. That is, sometimes, you drag a transition down to the gap between two clips in the timeline and nothing happens. Nothing.

I could feel my frustration boiling over. Here it was, about 1 pm in the afternoon. I had spent almost every waking minute that day in various video editing tasks, failing again and again and again. And now this new app that I figured I’d be using was screwing me over too. Why would this work sometimes and not others? That inconsistency thing was raising its ugly head yet again.

So I Googled it like anyone would.

And I gotta tell you, there is something going on with Google that I also find frustrating: many times when I search for something now, the first many results are all videos, not website links. I don’t want to watch a video, each of which is padded with superfluous gabbing where it’s difficult to just get the answer, I want to read text and just solve the problem. This annoys me because it’s the default search page. If I wanted to search for videos, I’d just use YouTube. I wish there was a way to never show videos in Google Search results, but I’ve looked and haven’t found it.

Anyway. In Googling this problem, I ran into a common issue with technical topics (this is true of programming topics too, for example). That is, rather than just answering the question, many of the responses you see online in things like support forums, are from experts who belittle the person asking the question, or who understand the app in question so thoroughly that they no longer even understand that the problem is legitimate and frustrating but instead present it as just the way things are. And the answer in this case is ridiculous. Literally that sometimes this just happens. No one knows why. And you’re expected to manually trim the clips on either side of this transition-to-be until it magically just works.

I can’t state this emphatically enough. F#$% that. Just f#$% that.

Now it was 2 pm. I had wasted away several hours by that point. It was time for lunch. And I was livid. With myself. With Premiere Elements and DaVinci Resolve. And with the world. We walked out the door to grab something to eat, and I was just seething. This day was the exact opposite of what I wanted and expected. And it was left hanging with the uncertainty of what would come next.

Careful not to unload on my wife while we walked and then ate, I knew I had only one option: I would use Clipchamp to make the next video and, if that worked out, I would just switch to Clipchamp for my video editing needs. This was a future I had honestly not really considered. And it felt weird because it’s a Windows 11 in-box app, and these apps are generally not very good, though this one came via an acquisition and was different. And another advantage dawned on me: switching to Clipchamp would mean one less app to install on every PC, as it’s already there. That is actually kind of huge for me.

By the time we started walking home from lunch, my mood had cleared up nicely. I still had some concerns, but I was starting to think that the day’s disasters had a silver lining. I knew I’d never get any writing done that day, and that is always frustrating for me. But if I could transition to Clipchamp successfully, if I actually liked this app and it did everything I needed, maybe, just maybe, it would all have been worth it.

Folks, I’m telling you. It was worth it.

When we got back to the apartment, I fired up Clipchamp and did what I did with DaVinci Resolve: I recreated that video montage using the same assets as before. And as I went through each step, importing assets, laying them out in the timeline (with multiple video tracks, a capability I was worried Clipchamp would push some limitation on but did not), adding transitions, making small cuts, and previewing as I went, it all come together quickly. Clipchamp is the anti-DaVinci Resolve, it’s simple and powerful. It’s almost intuitive, assuming you’ve done video editing of some kind before. Even adding the green-screen keying effect I needed to make that YouTube “subscribe” animation work was simple to find and use. I (re)created that video quickly and easily, and exactly as I had intended to do several hours earlier. I exported the full video, and then nervously scrubbed through the result in VLC. It was perfect. No glitches, nothing. It just worked. You know, like it should.

This was good. This was very good. And so my wife and I recorded our next video in about 15 minutes after spending 30 minutes or so making talking point notes. And then I started a new project in Clipchamp and performed the same workflow I have with Premiere Elements by creating the other assets I needed, importing all of the assets, assembling it all in the timeline, adding transitions and making small edits, and so on.

And in an interesting twist, Clipchamp has the simplest and fastest way of adding the crossfade transition I use exclusively that I’ve ever seen, because that’s the default transition in this app. All you need to do is mouse over the gap between two clips and then click the green “Add transition” button that appears. Voila! You’re done, and without any of DaVinci Resolve’s “sometimes it randomly doesn’t work” nonsense.

This video wasn’t particularly long—about 7 and a half minutes—and it was much simpler to edit than the previous one because there was only one main video clip, not several. And Clipchamp’s ease of use really helped, too. Where I had spent hours trying to figure out DaVinci Resolve, only to run into a roadblock that I think is a deal-breaker, Clipchamp just works. I create this video in record time, so much so that my wife, who was aware of the issues I’d had that day but not the intricate details, commented on how fast it was when I told her she could see it on YouTube.

You can too, if you’re bored. There is one issue with the video, though that was my fault: I had forgotten to make sure I was on the right microphone while recording in Zoom, even though my wife told me I sounded a bit tinny. So my bit was recorded through the laptop’s microphones, not the nicer USB mic I use here in Mexico. But that’s not on Clipchamp, it’s on me. Clipchamp worked like a, well, champ.

Looking back on this, what I see—aside from my anger management issues—is an interesting parallel to the conversation we have about using Windows vs. one of its competitors. And the comment I always make, as Windows 11 gets more and more unbearable, is that I continue to use Windows not because of anything Microsoft is doing now, but rather because the competition hasn’t done enough. I still prefer Windows to the Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS because those systems are lacking in some way that is important to me. With video editing, I didn’t switch to Clipchamp out of some desire to use the program, I was driven to Clipchamp because the issues with Premiere Elements became so bad and so frustrating that I had no choice.

I’m glad it happened. Clipchamp is a wonderful app and an excellent voice for video editing. That it is a web app should (but I know won’t) silence critics of web apps, people who believe that these things just can’t possibly be as sophisticated as native apps. As a web app, Clipchamp does have some quirks, and I’ll cover those in the Clipchamp chapter I’ll soon be writing for the Windows 11 Field Guide. But Clipchamp is also a great example of an app that is in many ways just as powerful as those more complicated native app competitors while being much, much easier to use. Put simply, Clipchamp is better. And not just for me, but for most people as well, I bet.

Change is hard. But it’s nice when you can make a positive change like this. And today is a much happier day than yesterday. Hell, I wrote this 4200-word article before noon.

Thanks, Clipchamp.