DEV Community: Saarathi Academy

Before you pay for a video editing course in Nepal, try these free steps

Saarathi Academy — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 15:02:58 +0000

You can learn the basics of video editing in Nepal for free, and you should try that before you pay for any course. Install the free DaVinci Resolve, work through Blackmagic's free beginner book, and cut one short video of your own. Two weeks of this tells you more than any brochure.

Here is what to do in those two weeks, and how to tell when a paid course is worth it.

Is the free DaVinci Resolve good enough to learn on?

Yes. Blackmagic Design, the company that makes it, says the free version "works with virtually all 8-bit video formats at up to 60fps in resolutions as high as Ultra HD". The paid Studio version adds AI tools, extra effects, AI noise reduction and 10-bit video up to 120fps. A beginner does not need any of that.

The free version has every page you need. Edit is for cutting, Color for colour, Fairlight for sound, Fusion for titles and Deliver for export. You learn the whole workflow in one app.

We would not start with a cracked copy of Premiere Pro. Many Kathmandu job posts do name Premiere Pro and After Effects. But cutting, trimming, pacing and colour work the same way in every editor. Once you know them in Resolve, the Adobe buttons are the easy part to learn later.

Will it run on my laptop?

Probably, with one trick. Free Resolve runs on 8GB of RAM if you edit with proxy files. A proxy is a lighter copy of a heavy video file. You edit the light copy, and Resolve uses the full file when you export. Blackmagic recommends 16GB of RAM, and more for 4K and Fusion work.

Keep about 100GB of free space, ideally on an SSD. An external SSD works well if your laptop drive is small and already full.

Week 1: the free beginner book

Go to Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve training page. Download "The Beginner's Guide to DaVinci Resolve" as a PDF, and download its lesson files too. The lesson files are the practice footage the book uses, so your screen matches the pages. Video files are heavy, so download them once on a good connection and keep a copy on an external drive.

Start with the editing chapters. In the first week, aim for three skills. Learn the J, K and L keys to play, pause and move through footage quickly. Learn to trim a cut without leaving a gap, which Resolve calls a ripple trim. Then export a finished edit as an H.264 file, the standard format for the web.

Don't jump between ten different YouTube tutorials. One book, start to finish, teaches you in order. Random tutorials teach you tricks without the basics under them.

Week 2: cut one short video of your own

Now shoot about ten minutes of your own footage on your phone. Film a friend talking about their work, a tea shop opening in the morning, or a short walk through your neighbourhood. Then cut it into one 60-second vertical video in 9:16, the shape of a Reel or a TikTok.

This is where you learn what the book cannot teach. The first three seconds decide whether people keep watching, so cut until the opening shot earns its place. Every cut should have a reason you can say out loud.

Beginners often forget sound. Record 20 seconds of silence in the same room, called room tone, so you can fill gaps without a sudden change in the background noise. For music, use the YouTube Audio Library. Google says its tracks are copyright-safe and will not be claimed through Content ID. Filter for "Attribution not required", because Creative Commons tracks need the artist credited in your video description.

How do I know I'm ready for a paid course?

After two weeks, be honest with yourself. You are ready to pay when most of these are true:

You can import, cut, trim and export without a tutorial open.
You finished one 60-second edit, even if you don't like it.
You can name what is wrong with it: shots that don't match in colour, a voice that keeps getting louder and quieter, music that fights the speech.
You want someone to show you how to fix those things.

If you stopped after three days because it bored you, a course will not change that. Save your money. Editing is long hours alone with a timeline, and the free weeks show you that for nothing.

If you got stuck on colour and sound, that is normal. Those are the parts free videos teach worst, because nobody watches your cut and tells you what is wrong.

What should a paid course give you that free videos don't?

A certificate is not the point. A career guide on NecoJobs puts it plainly: "Employers want to see your real work, not just certificates." So judge a course by the work you leave with, and by who reviews it.

At Saarathi Academy in Old Baneshwor, Kathmandu, the Video Editing course runs for 5 weeks, 2 hours a day, Monday to Friday. Classes run in person and online, with up to 10 students in the classroom per batch. Mentors still do the job they teach.

You learn on the free DaVinci Resolve 21 and the free plan of CapCut, so no paid app is needed. Weeks 1 and 2 cover cutting, pacing and short vertical video. Week 3 is colour on the Color page, read with scopes. Week 4 is sound in Fairlight, including dialogue repair and mixing to -14 LUFS for delivery.

Your project uses supplied footage with real problems in it, like bad audio and mixed light. By Week 5 you have a demo reel of 30 to 60 seconds, and your mentor reviews it with you one to one.

We don't teach Premiere Pro or After Effects, because they need a paid plan and a stronger laptop. We cover what each one is for, and your Resolve skills carry over.

Start tonight

Install the free DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic's site, then download the beginner book with its lesson files. Finish the first chapter before you sleep.

When you're ready for feedback on colour, sound and a real reel, the Video Editing course page has the details, and the week-by-week syllabus is public before you pay.

How to judge a cyber security course in Nepal before you pay

Saarathi Academy — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:22:12 +0000

To judge a cyber security course in Nepal, ask for its week-by-week syllabus before you pay. If a course cannot show you what happens in week 1, week 6 and week 12, you cannot judge it, so do not pay for it.

Most course pages list the same tools: Kali Linux, Burp Suite, Metasploit, Nmap. A list of tools tells you very little. The order of the weeks, the lab setup and the final piece of work tell you much more. Here are seven questions to ask, and what a good answer sounds like.

What does the course teach before any hacking?

Look at the first month. If week 1 opens with Metasploit, the course is selling excitement, not skill.

Every attack you learn later sits on networking and Linux. You cannot read a scan result if you do not know what a port is. You cannot follow a privilege escalation lab if the output of ls -l means nothing to you. A good syllabus spends the first weeks on how the internet works, TCP/IP, the terminal, and Linux users and permissions. Attack tools come after that.

Which job does the course train you for?

"Ethical hacking" describes what you do, not which job you apply for. Ask the course which junior job it prepares you for. Then check that the syllabus matches that job.

Two common first jobs are junior VAPT analyst and Tier-1 SOC analyst. VAPT means finding and proving security holes in a system, with written permission. A SOC is the team that watches a company's security alerts. The first job needs web and API testing. The second needs log reading and a SIEM, which is a tool that collects security logs in one place. A course that only teaches attacking closes the second door.

Then read the job ads yourself. In Nepal, security jobs are posted on company career pages, merojob, KumariJob, JobAxle and LinkedIn, and many remote roles are open too. Read five ads, write down the skills they ask for, and compare that list with the syllabus.

Will your laptop run the labs?

Few people ask this, and it saves the most trouble. Security labs run practice machines inside your laptop, with a tool like VirtualBox. Running several of them at once needs a lot of memory.

Ask for the exact laptop spec. Ask what happens if you have only 8GB of RAM. If you own a Mac, ask about it directly. Macs with Apple chips (M1 and later) cannot run the usual x86 practice machines, and it is better to learn that before you pay than in week 3.

Also ask whether the course gives you a device or expects you to bring your own.

Does the course teach the law, and where do you practise?

In Nepal, getting into a computer without the owner's permission is an offence under Section 45 of the Electronic Transactions Act 2063. Section 46 covers damaging or changing someone's data. Testing a real website without written permission is not practice. It is an offence.

So ask two things. Does the course teach scope and written permission in the first week, before any attack? And where do students practise? A good answer names legal training targets, like PortSwigger's labs, TryHackMe, HackTheBox or a lab the course builds itself. A worrying answer is "on real websites".

What do you hand in at the end?

A penetration tester's real product is the report. A client pays for a document that says what is broken, how bad it is, and how to fix it.

Ask if the course ends with a written VAPT report on a target with a clear scope. Ask who reads that report. A mentor should read it line by line and push back on weak findings. A multiple choice quiz cannot do that. The report is also the first thing you show an employer, so it matters more than any single tool.

Ask how the course teaches note taking too. Testers write down every command and screenshot with a time as they work. The report is built from those notes, and messy notes give a weak report.

What does the course say about certificates?

Nepal job ads name CEH most often, so many courses mention it. Ask three plain questions. Is an exam voucher included? Is there real exam preparation, or does the course only cover the topics? Which CEH topics are left out?

An honest course answers all three without trouble. A certificate is a separate exam with its own cost, so treat it as a separate decision. Do not let the word "CEH" on a poster make it for you.

Who teaches, and how many people are in the room?

Ask whether the mentor works in security now, or only teaches it. Then ask the batch size. In a lab course, things break all the time: a machine will not boot, a tool will not connect. The mentor has to look at your screen to fix it. In a room of 40, that hardly happens.

Two free things to try tonight

Before you pay anyone, find out if you enjoy this work.

Start the TryHackMe Pre Security path. It teaches networking, Linux and Windows basics from zero. The early rooms are free, and the free plan gives you about one hour a day of a ready-made attack machine in your browser.
Make a free account on the PortSwigger Web Security Academy and try the first SQL injection lab. The whole academy is free, and the free Burp Suite Community Edition works for most labs.

If you finish a few rooms and want more, you are ready to judge a course. If you are bored after one hour, you learned that for free.

How our course answers these seven questions

At Saarathi Academy in Old Baneshwor, Kathmandu, the Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking course runs for 12 weeks. Weeks 1 to 4 cover the terminal, networks, recon and Linux before any web testing. It trains for two jobs, junior web and API VAPT analyst and Tier-1 SOC analyst, and Week 10 is hands-on with the Wazuh SIEM. Week 11 is a scoped assessment and a written report, with peer review and mentor feedback.

We recommend 16GB of RAM and an Intel or AMD laptop, and you bring your own. The course covers most CEH v13 topics, but it has no exam-prep track and no exam voucher. Each batch has up to 10 students in the classroom, and our mentors still do the job they teach. Every syllabus is public on our website before anyone pays.

Read the full week-by-week syllabus and the course page, and hold us to the same seven questions.

PERN stack full form, and why we would learn it before MERN

Saarathi Academy — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 04:57:46 +0000

PERN stands for PostgreSQL, Express, React and Node.js. MERN is the same stack with one letter changed: MongoDB in place of PostgreSQL. So the real question behind "PERN vs MERN" is not about four tools. It is about one choice, the database.

If you are starting out in Nepal and want backend or full stack work, we would learn PERN first. Here is what each letter does, and why the database letter matters most.

What each letter in PERN does

P is PostgreSQL. It is a relational database. Data lives in tables with rows and columns, and tables link to each other. You talk to it with SQL. It is free and open source.

E is Express. It is a small framework that runs on Node.js. It receives a request from a browser or an app, sends it to the right code, and returns a response.

R is React. It is a JavaScript library for the part users see. It builds the screens, buttons and forms in the browser.

N is Node.js. It is the program that runs JavaScript on a server instead of in a browser. Express runs on top of it.

Put together, it works like this. React shows a form and the user clicks save. The request goes to an Express route running on Node.js. That route writes a row into PostgreSQL. One language, JavaScript or TypeScript, runs on both sides, which is why these stacks are popular with beginners.

MERN vs PERN: only one letter changes

In MERN, the M is MongoDB. MongoDB stores data as documents that look like JSON objects. You do not have to design tables before you save something, so it feels fast in the first week.

The E, R and N stay the same. Your React code does not care which database sits behind the API. Your Express routes look almost the same too. What changes is how you design your data, how you query it, and what breaks when the app grows. We go through the two side by side in MERN stack vs PERN stack.

Why we would learn PostgreSQL first

Our pick is PostgreSQL. The main reason is simple: SQL is the database skill that follows you to almost every backend job.

Look at where backend work is posted in Nepal. Many Kathmandu companies build with PHP and Laravel. Others use Java, .NET, Python or Node.js. Most of these teams keep their main data in a relational database like PostgreSQL or MySQL. If you know SQL well, you can read their database on day one, even when their language is new to you.

The second reason is the thinking it forces. A relational database makes you design your data before you write code. You decide what a user is, what an order is, and how the two connect. This step is hard at first. It is also what interviewers test. Written tests here often ask about SQL joins and normalisation, which means splitting data into tables so the same fact is not stored twice.

MongoDB is not a bad choice. It fits data with no fixed shape, like logs, or content where every item has different fields. The trouble is the habit it builds in beginners. Many put everything inside one big document. Later they need to combine data across documents, and the code gets messy. A learner who knows tables usually picks up documents quickly. Going the other way is harder.

What "PERN stack developer" means in a job post

When a post says "PERN stack developer" or "MERN stack developer", read the rest of it closely. Usually the company wants someone who can build a feature end to end. That means a screen in React, an API route, and the database change behind it.

The stack name is only a label. The real needs are in the details. Look for REST API, authentication, TypeScript, Docker and Git. Those words decide your interview more than the letter M or P.

Few teams use plain Express and raw SQL exactly as tutorials show. Many add TypeScript and an ORM like Prisma. An ORM is a tool that lets you work with the database through code instead of writing every SQL query by hand. Some teams use NestJS or Next.js on top. Learn the four letters well first, and these extras come much easier.

The order we would learn PERN in

JavaScript, then TypeScript. Functions, arrays, objects, async and await. Every other letter depends on these.
Node.js and Express. Build a small API that returns JSON. Test it with curl before you write any frontend.
PostgreSQL and SQL. Tables, JOIN, GROUP BY and indexes. Then connect your API to the database.
React last. By now you have a real API to call, so your screens show real data.

Starting with the backend feels slow, because there is nothing pretty to show for a few weeks. But the backend is where most beginners get stuck later. It is better to meet it early, while you still have patience.

This order also suits an older laptop. With 8 GB of RAM, Node.js and one PostgreSQL database run fine together. Start the React dev server only when you need it.

Try this tonight

Install PostgreSQL, or run it in Docker if Docker is already on your laptop. Then work through the first chapters of the official PostgreSQL tutorial. Create two tables, add a few rows, and write one query with JOIN. If that query makes sense to you, the hardest letter of PERN is already started.

After that, get the Express hello world example running on your machine. That is two letters in one evening.

Our Backend Engineering course teaches the P, E and N in depth over 10 weeks, including a full week on SQL, PostgreSQL and Prisma and about two hours of MongoDB to compare. The week-by-week syllabus is public, so you can read every topic first.