Video Editing 101

With the large number of people who own camcorders plus the number of PCs and Macs out there, it is surprising that more people don't consider video editing.

Camcorders come in two basic flavours, analogue and digital. Analogue cameras include Video8, Hi8, VHS-C and SVHS-C. Digital ones are generally based on MiniDV. Analogue ones tend to be cheaper than digital but the prices are getting very similar these days. Digital has the advantage that there is little degradation when copying from one machine to another but as the cameras themselves perform compression internally, there is a small amount of loss. Analogue can still be very good when using decent hardware to capture the footage. Let's start by looking at this all important stage.

Capture

Before you can edit the video footage, you need to get it on to your PC's hard disk. This is performed via a video capture card. These can range in price from as little as £100 to £700 and beyond for the semi-pro gear. Analogue is harder to capture as it involves converting from analogue to digital on the fly. To get good results you need a fast processor say a Pentium 3 running at 700Mhz or faster. A good chunk of RAM helps and reasonably fast hard drives are a must. A system that guarantees no dropped frames would be something like a 700Mhz CPU with 128Mb RAM and hard drives capable of a sustained 5Mb/sec throughput. You should use the s-video connection between the camera and PC if possible but failing that, composite video is adequate.

Digital is rather easier as the video is already digital and all that is needed is a Firewire or IEEE1394 capture card. Firewire and IEEE1394 are actually both names for the same type of connection. Most MiniDV cameras sold in the European Union only have a DV-Out connector which means you can send video from the camera to the PC. Without a DV-In connection you cannot send footage back to the camera to be recorded which may be an issue as we will see later.

One thing to be aware of is that storing and editing video takes a lot of disk space. MiniDV requires around 2Gb to store ten minutes of footage. Analogue's storage requirements depend on the resolution and compression method used to capture it but expect lots of disk space to disappear! For any reasonable amount of editing, allow for at least 20Gb of disk space unless you wish to do it in small chunks. A better size would be 40 or 60Gb.

Editing

So now you have a hard disk full of bits of footage, what can you do? Your options depend on how much you have spent on hardware and software but I'll outline the basics here.

The first thing you'll want to do is tidy up the bits of footage. You can trim off excess at the start and end of the clips and maybe cut up clips in to different scenes. Once this is done you'll have all the clips you wish to work with as separate files. If space is tight you can always delete the originals and only keep the "clean" sections. Some video editors work by just noting at which point in the footage you wish to start and stop clips within the original footage so you have to keep the originals.

You'll now need to stitch all the separate parts together into the finished footage. Most packages include a timeline feature whereby you simply drag and drop the separate clips on to a strip in the order you want them.

Now you need to decide if you want each clip to just cut from one to the other or if you want a transition. These can range from the basics where one scene fades in to another through to more complex ones where one scene appears in stripes over the other. You may want to go really mad and have the new scene spin in to place as if it was a rotating page coming from the distance. Whichever you choose, be careful you don't overdo it. Too many weird and wonderful transitions can be tiring on the eye and look very amateur.

Sound

Whilst the original soundtrack may be adequate, you can easily enhance it in several ways. One way is to capture some music from a CD or MP3 file and have that play in the background to add some mood. This can either replace the original audio or merge with it. You might also want to replace some parts if the original audio wasn't quite right. For instance, some footage of a waterfall might have got rather muted sound or might not sound like you want at all. You could find some audio that sounds much better and use this to replace the original. You could also add extra effects such as bird song. Many video editing packages include a library of spot sound effects for this purpose.

Titles

Finally, you might want to add some titles. These can simply be the title of the video over the opening scenes. You can add a full set of credits at the end or perhaps use them to indicate where different scenes have been shot on a holiday video.

Finishing

Once you have your masterpiece finished, it is time to get it back on tape for viewing. You can preview it on the PC's screen but for seeing the finished thing in all its glory you really need to get it recorded back to tape.

If you are using MiniDV, you'll either need a camcorder with DV-in or a PC card capable of outputting analogue video. In the former case you simply record the edited results back to the camcorder, ideally to a different tape so you still have the original footage. Failing that you'll have to connect a video recorder to your computer via a PCI card with analogue outputs.

If you have any transitions, audio changes or titles then your PC will need to create those bits of video prior to output and this stage is called rendering. Rendering involves recreating the footage from scratch and is very processor intensive and as such, the faster the processor the better. Only when all rendered sections are completed is the finished product recorded to tape.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, it needn't be. Modern software at the lower end of the market makes it as easy as using a word processor although more advanced packages like Adobe Premier are both complex and powerful. That said, nothing beats the feeling of satisfaction at turning that jumble of bits you filmed on your last holiday in to a polished finished product.

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com