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 issue...