Game capture and editing software for beginners - recommendations please!

[Haggisman]

My son is starting to get into making videos of his gaming to put on Youtube.

At the moment he's using the free editing software which comes with Windows (Clipchamp?), but this seems pretty limited in functionality (hardly surprising since it's free!), so I was thinking of getting him something a bit better for Christmas.

Given that he's 11, and it's entirely possible he's going to lose interest within a few months, I'm not sure spending a huge amount is worthwhile (was looking at Adobe Premiere Elements, but it's £80).

Does anyone here do similar, and can give any recommendations for software which is pretty feature rich, but relatively easy for a beginner to pick up (or at least has a good amount of online tutorials)?

Is it worth getting a capture card as well? (Are these even a thing still?)

I'm aware that yeah, most kids/teenagers want to be the next Dan TDM or whatever, which is very unlikely to happen, but the way I see it, if he's learning to edit video properly it's a potentially useful skill (and certainly more productive than just playing games).

 

[andshrew]

I'd suggest trying them with Davinci Resolve (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/davinciresolve). While it may look scary and professional, there are an absolute ton of video tutorials on YouTube that I'm sure an 11 year old who's interested in this could follow (and these are tutorials focused on the type of editing he likely wants to do). Worst case if he finds it too much then its free anyway so hasn't wasted anything other than time.

If he's playing on PlayStation then their built in Share Factory app is both reasonably powerful in terms of functionality while being pretty straight forward to use.

 

[Haggisman]

Thanks, I'll take a look at that

He's on PC, and he's currently using the built in Microsoft game bar capture; quality is OK, but seems there's quite a bit of compression going on which results in some fuzzy in-game text. Maybe he just needs to tweak the capture settings some.

Going to get him to try the capture via Geforce Experience as well, and have just found something called OBS which seems to be quite recommended - looks like a capture card probably isn't needed unless he wants to record stuff from his Switch

 

[andshrew]

Yes give Geforce Experience a go, I use that and the quality of the captures seem fine. You've got control over bitrates, resolution and framerate which I don't think you get in the Microsoft app.

 

[Haggisman]

Yes give Geforce Experience a go, I use that and the quality of the captures seem fine. You've got control over bitrates, resolution and framerate which I don't think you get in the Microsoft app.

No, it doesn't seem to have any settings at all! It doesn't even seem to allow changing where the captures are saved, so he keeps needing to move them from his (small) system drive to his main drive