The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I don't think we have a thread about making music videos? I have very little experience in doing it. I imagine lots of folks here have tips and tricks and info they could share that could be helpful for others.

I'll start, I recently saw a link to this site which has high quality videos that I think are free to use:

https://www.pexels.com/search/videos/videos/

From the previews I've checked on there they look very professional.

There's a lot of ancient royalty-free stock video on archive.org, especially the Prelinger Archives which Jerkatorium uses for most of their videos.

For editing software, DaVinci Resolve has a free version that's pretty capable, although it's a bit wonky to get the hang of especially if you're used to Premiere or Final Cut Pro, but if you're just getting started in videos you're probably learning video editing software from the get-go anyway.

If you want something to generate visualizers for overlays or the like, you can get a lot of mileage out of FFmpeg although that's definitely on the "fiddly and hard to learn" end of things. There's a whole bunch of tutorials online for how to use a free visualizer plugin for DaVinci Resolve although it's pretty limited in my experience (and a pain in the ass to actually use).

I don't have much to add except that, yes, DaVinci Resolve is probably the BEST FREE Video Editing Software available and once you get the hang of it is amazing. I've even bought and use a little XP Pen ACK05: https://www.xp-pen.com/download/ack05.html on a couple of my PC/Laptops (the v3.4 software is better than the v4.0 software though if you get one as it actually shows the Macro Buttons on one screen with labels) mainly for the Jog Wheel during editing (the software also allows it to be used differently depending on the Software/App you're using it with, so I've got it setup for Reaper too!). Originally, I had been using Reaper as my FREE Video Editor, but as much as I'll always tout Reaper as the BEST FREE DAW available, DaVinci Resolve is that much better as a FREE Video Editor.