The Basics of Video Editing: Part 3 by Andrew Alexander Published on Feb 6, 2002 12:00 AM

The Final Render

The act of "rendering" means the process by which the computer interprets the blueprint you've created through editing, and creates the video you have worked so hard on. If it's just a matter of re-arranging clips, it shouldn't take too long; if you have added transition effects, filters, special effects or other complicated options, depending on the speed of your computer, you may have to be prepared to leave it overnight to render.

But, once it's finished rendering, you will have a final product to view. I suggest reviewing it a few times to make sure it's exactly how you want it, and getting a friend to watch it helps, too - they haven't been working on it as closely as you have and can give you an impartial opinion about what works and what doesn't work.

Distribution format

The first thing I suggested in this process was to consider some basic questions about the characteristics of your final product, the second of which was, what format do you want for your final product. The choice in distribution format will greatly influence how you have to deal with outputing your final product.

·Back to the camcorder

Some video editor programs allow you to edit your project, and then when you're finished, output your product directly from the program to your camcorder. Instead of rendering the whole thing, the program only renders the points of the project which require it, and when those points are rendered it plays the whole project in stages. On a stable system, the process works well and saves a significant amount of disk space and render time. It can also allow Windows 95/98/ME systems to bypass the nineteen-minute size restrictions of Digital Video.

·VHS

VHS tapes are among the most common distribution format in the world - do you know anyone who doesn't have a TV and VCR? You have a two options when your final product is a VHS tape: You could edit your project and save it back to the camcorder, and then record it from the camcorder to the VCR; or, you could edit your project, render it as a new file, and play it through the TV-OUT of your video card direct to your VCR. If you don't have a TV-OUT option on your video card, then you're pretty much limited to option 1. The advantage of option 2 is that you can render at a lower quality than digital video, because recording to VHS tape means you are going to lose a fair amount of the quality of digital video anyway. A video encoded with a 352x240 frame size will look fine on a television.

·Digital format (CDROM/Internet)

The goal with a digital format is to compress the video so that its size is reduced with as little loss of quality as possible. The more compression you apply to a video will generally be inversely proportional to the quality - ie., the higher the compression, the lower the quality. If you decide that you want to produce your content in this format, you will generally want to apply the compression format before you run your final render. Depending on the compression format and other options you choose, and the render time may be longer or shorter than just rendering it as a digital video file, but it's almost certain that the file size will be dramatically smaller than if it was rendered as digital video.

The circumstances of your project may require that you render several different formats. For example, you may want a digital video master, as well as copies on VHS tape for physical distribution and compressed files for internet distribution. There is nothing to stop you from making your final cut on one format and then re-render the files in additional formats, it just may take a little longer. This series of articles has just scratched the surface of video editing, but hopefully I have touched on the more common aspects of the process. The best teacher in this area is practice - try your hand at editing small projects, just to get a feel for all the steps. That way, when you start your first full-scale project, it won't be as critical. Good luck!