rob aylestone
Moderator
Just use Reaper and add the required video codec packs to the USB drive installations for video import. All those formats are drag and drop with Reaper. I'd admit that Reaper isn't completely intuitive if you are new to computers but in this situation it can be set up with sensible defaults and templates so that it could be as simple as drag and drop to get started.
I get your point, but you'll be amazed the format you get given! I recently did a show where all the participants were asked to bring in an mp3 file so we could play it in the show. We had 10 in Act 1 and 9 in act 2.
I think we had something like 8 or 9 that played on our rack mount mp3 player. Old Apple protected formats being the worst problem, but others had all kinds of weirdnesses - some were AIFF, or WAV, and we were able to convert them, while others were things we had never experienced before, created on odd software.AAC and AMR? No idea what produces those! Quite a few were CDA format - all these, we were informed were MP3 files from MP3 players, so it was a real pain. Some seemed to actually be split video files, but the audio file refused to play without being run as a video file and the audio file was picked up by the software.
I guess the other problem is choosing software - reaper is great, but this puts you in the position of making a choice - what happens to an adobe, cubase, logic, PT or one of the others? If you limit the installation to one platform, you create another issue? Equally having a 'Reaper' DAW and a 'pro Tools' DAW is expensive.