CONTENT

[Beagle 2]

Hello. Dull post incoming.

It's part of my job to go out and produce short films for the organisation that I work for - interviews, case studies, that sort of thing. In fact, over the last couple of months that's pretty much all I've been doing, as I rashly suggested that we could bring it all in-house using basic equipment rather than shelling out thousands of pounds to a professional film company to produce niche videos that only a few hundred people will watch. Mostly this has gone well, the videos are turning out well, but the amount of work and faffing about has been a nightmare.

I use a combination of a £200 camcorder and my phone with a decent lapel mic to shoot everything, After Effects to knock up graphics and titles, and FCPX to edit everything (very slowly, as it's crawling on my bloated mac at present). I then have to piss about to get these films into the best format, aspect ratio and length for Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and Instagram.

I have no access to a content management suite like Hootsuite, so it's jumping between the office MacBook and my work computer and using the native websites. Subtitling in particular is a massive pain in the arse, I do it all manually in FCPX (there are reasons why auto-captioning on Youtube/Facebook aren't an option). Videos don't upload to Twitter half the time for no apparent reason and you can't upload to Instagram from a desktop, so that's an extra faff.

Why am I telling you this boring load of old shite?

It just occurs to me that there must be a simpler way to put together basic videos for social media, like a stripped down all-in-one editor that I can use to edit, caption and optimise everything for different channels quickly. Maybe you can recomment a free content management system that I can use like Hootsuite that I can also use on my phone, and maybe even works in Internet Explorer on my work computer (haha).

Also for shooting and sharing stuff on the fly, is there a decent Android editing app that might be able to do all this stuff as well, possibly integrate with a desktop counterpart? Well, I'm sure there are many, but what's the best? Obviously I'm willing to shell out.

Any advice gratefully received.