The Basics of Video Editing: Part 1 by Andrew Alexander Published on Aug 13, 2001 12:00 AM

There are two basic situations you can find yourself in when faced with a task of editing video.

The first is the best case scenario; you planned out your project well before you shot, set up storyboards to figure out what you were going to shoot, and filmed exactly what you set out to shoot.

Your job, should you accept it - transform this into a 30 minute presentation!

The second situation is what most of us face when getting into video editing. You end up with a few hours of good and bad footage, and have to spend as much time reviewing the footage as you spent filming it to figure out what you want to edit.

Of course we’d all like to have the first situation, but invariably you’ll encounter situations like the second. With a little planning however, it’s not as impossible a task as it seems.

Part 1 - Preparation

Before you even turn on the computer you should some thinking in advance to determine what you want the results of your efforts to be.

• How long do you want your end product to be?

If your operating system is limited to a two gigabyte file (Windows 95/98/ME), you will be limited to a single file of nineteen minutes in length. There are ways around this in some editing programs.

• What format do you want it to be available on - VHS tape, CDROM, on the internet, or back to the camcorder tape?

If your format is VHS tape or back onto the camcorder tape, you won’t have to do anything to the quality of the content, but you will need a lot of disk space to store it for editing. For CDROM or distribution on the internet, you will have to consider using a compression scheme to shrink the file size. You may also wish to consider using a streaming video format (see my last article) to optimize the file for viewing on the internet.

At the beginning of the process you should also think about a theme with which you want to present your video. On your footage you have a wealth of moments and scenes, but the editing process requires you to tie them all together in a meaningful way. You also need to consider that editing a project takes a lot of time, for complex projects, it can take up to an hour or two of editing for just a few minutes.

Answers to these questions will dramatically influence the method and strategy by which you will be editing your video.

Part 2 - Review and Capture

After you’ve decided how you want to proceed and what you want to end up with, you must now proceed to organize the materials you will use in the edit process. If you started out with storyboards and followed them faithfully, then you already have your blueprint for your edit.

The first task you must undertake, then, is to review your material to separate the wheat from the chaff - what you will probably be using in your project, and what you definitely not be using. A second task you must undertake is to capture the materials you intend to edit from the camcorder to the computer. Fortunately, these two tasks can go hand in hand; simply set up your system so that when you review your footage on the camcorder, you are in a position to capture it onto your hard drive.

Alternately, you can review the material and take notes regarding time. After you’ve compiled this list, you can set up your capture program to capture exactly these time intervals (clips) if your program supports this function. The clips are what you’ll be editing.

In the next article, we’ll cover the actual editing process and finally, considerations in finalizing the content.