The Three Basic Steps to Edit and Create Wonderful Home Movies

By Mark Shapiro

Have you started editing your hours of video? Do you have dozens or more of videotapes just sitting on a drawer or a shelf waiting for a miracle to happen? Are you the type you carries your camcorder to every event, every family party and outing, filling countless tapes with wonderful shots of your kids, family and friends, and then, have never watched it back? Unfortunately, I think most of us fall into that category. Maybe you are not as extreme but I’m sure you have tons of tapes that could use some editing. So what are you waiting for?

 Is it the cost? I doubt it – there are many free video-editing programs that ship with many personal computers on the market. Windows computers come with MovieMaker and Apple computers come with iMovie. If you’d prefer an editing package with a little more pizzazz, there are dozens of products on the market for under $100. Many of them offer downloadable trial versions so you can try them out for free.

 Maybe you think editing is too difficult? It really isn’t. Let me explain the basic three steps and maybe you will feel motivated to start cutting your videos into cool little productions and home movies that can be shared with your friends and family members.

 All video editing programs on the market today are what are known as nonlinear editing systems. This means that you can remove, cut and paste the scenes into whatever order you want, add and change music, titles and transitions, all without having to start editing from the beginning all over again. Just a few years ago, linear or assembly video editing was the dominant style. You copied your scenes one by one from your source tape to your edited master tape, one by one. If you made a mistake or changed your mind you either had to redo the entire edit, or worse, start over from scratch.

 Today’s video editing programs are essentially just databases, telling the computer where to find the various video files and what to do with them when it comes time to finish and output your video. Not only does this mean you can have an almost unlimited amount of changes and redoes, it also means that the original video clips, once captured onto your hard drive, are not affected by your edits, effects and transitions.

 The three major steps are capturing, assembling and then sharing. The most complicated is assembling. Lets begin however with capturing.

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 Capturing Video – Step 1

 Capturing video means to transfer the video from your camcorder into your computer. If you have a new straight to DVD camcorder, you can simply pull the DVD out of the camcorder and stick it in your computer’s DVD player.

 If you using an analog video camcorder – i.e. – VHS, 8m, etc, you then need to get a special video converter card or a converter device that will transform the analog video and audio signals into a digital format that your computer will understand. There are many different conversion products on the market – some are computer cards that require you to open up your computer and install it in an available PCI slot on your motherboard. Even though this is a bit more work than the standalone boxes, you usually get better performance as well as less cost.

 Others are standalone devices. On one side you connect your camcorders video and audio inputs and on the other side, you connect the converter boxes output to your computer. Some of these converter boxes connect via USB and others connect via 1394.

By the way, don’t be confused about 1394, iLink, DV and Firewire. In the camcorder and video editing world, all these terms essentially mean the same thing.  They all refer to the same digital video technology, cables and connectors. Whether you are using a Mac or a Windows computer, all of these connectors should work together. 

 Some of the converter boxes use USB to transfer the digitized video and audio signal. This is very helpful if you have a windows or Linux computer that doesn’t support firewire or 1394. By the way, if you are looking at an USB converter box, get one that uses the higher speed USB 2.0 protocol rather than the slower USB 1.1 protocol.

 By the way, if you do have a bunch of old analog videotapes you want to edit, you can use a newer digital video or digital 8 camcorder to help you. Most DV camcorders include analog in connections. Just connect the two camcorders together and transfer your old footage to DV.

 If you are transferring from digital video or digital8 tape you simply need to connect your camcorder’s Firewire (iLink or 1384) connector to your computer’s digital video input jack. The digital video connector transfers both video and audio over the same cable. Many new computers come with a built in digital video connector. If yours doesn’t, you can buy an adapter that plugs into the PCI board inside your computer for less than $50. Many of these adapter boards also come with their own bundled video editing software as well.

Most modern video editing software programs include a utility to make it simple to transfer your video from the camcorder to your computer’s hard drive. Using an interface similar to a VCR control panel, you can fast forward, rewind, play and record the appropriate video sections. Just hit play and whenever you see a scene you want to include, hit RECORD. Hit STOP when the scene ends. Not too complex.

 In addition, many video-editing programs also can do automated scene selection. As the video rolls and is captured on to your hard drive, the computer video editing software recognizes the various changes between scenes, and automatically breaks them up into smaller scenes to make it easier to move and edit them together. Some programs do this on the fly as you capture while others do it after the entire video has been captured and then do the separation.

 This can help make editing your videos a lot simpler because you don’t need to go through and cut a single long video into smaller and smaller pieces. However, sometimes for a speech or dramatic presentation, you might want to have one long video record. In that case, most capture programs enable you to turn off the automatic scene detection feature.

 The capture process also lets you capture and input music, still images, narration and other components that can serve to enlighten your video production. Depending on your computer, and what you have connected to it, you can source these elements from many places – from digital still cameras, from your canner, from stock image and music sources, CDs and the Internet, as well as capturing music tracks directly from your music CDs.

 Many video editing programs offer music “ripping” capabilities for converting music to a digital format suitable for editing. Of course, most music editing and most music playback programs also offer the same capability. At the most basic level, the generic Audio Recorder program found in Microsoft Windows will also allow you to capture music and narration. And it’s free. You can also use the free Windows Media Player.

 Editing – Step 2

 Once you have the video and audio captured onto your hard drive, the real fun begins. Editing is a creative process that can include many different paths – from the basic cutting out of bad video and audio, to creating a chronological record of an event, to actually creating a complete production that tells a story or conveys a message, complete with special effects, transitions, music, voice-over and the other elements to separate a simple video from a true production.

 There’s a wide range of video editing software packages to pick among. From free and inexpensive programs for basic video editing all the way to highly sophisticated editing suites targeted for video professionals. Many camcorders, video peripherals and computers often include a basic video-editing program bundled into the package. If you are a Windows XP user, the free MovieMaker program is very powerful but still easy to use. For Mac users, iMovie provides similar benefits and ease of use. If you do decide to try out MovieMaker, make sure you use the newer (and still free) MovieMaker 2 programs available as a free download from Microsoft. If you are going to download it, you may as well download and install the full Windows Movie Maker 2 Creativity Fun Pack that includes the MovieMaker 2 program as well as collection of cool pre-made video titles, music and sound effects. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/mmcreate.mspx

 Video editing programs have been around for over a decade, and in that time, have evolved to offer similar types of “look and feel”. In other words, when you master one program, it should be relatively easily to master another video editing program. If you are new to editing, you might want to start with a free basic program and then move up as your skills and desires increase.

 On most video editing programs, the user interface offers a window to store, organize and access the video and audio files for editing, as well as the various music clips, special effects, titles and transitions. Another window serves as the playback/preview window where you can see how your video will look, and then, one large window for the actual assembly of your video program.

 Most video editing programs offer either a “storyboard” type of window or a “timeline” window, or even both. The storyboard window is most helpful for video tyros who are just starting to edit while the timeline view offers a more powerful, more comprehensive approach. Many video programs offer both approaches and enable you to switch back and forth as needed.

 A storyboard-editing format is usually just a single track that includes your video clips, audio and music, as well as titles, effects and transitions. It is called a Storyboard because you use it like telling a story, putting in one scene after another in a chronological format. A timeline format looks different and is composed of numerous horizontal tracks for your video and audio files. You may also have separate horizontal tracks for effects, text & title overlays and transitions as well.

Editing using Storyboard

Using a storyboard approach for editing makes a lot of sense for beginners as well as for professionals who wish to quickly create a general sense of how their program will look. The storyboard approach is usually easier and simpler than using a timeline. You simply click and drop in your scenes one by one on the storyboard, essentially building a chronological movie of consecutive scene. Even through you are building your movie by assembling it together, this is still nonlinear editing. This means that once you have all the components on the storyboard, you can still move them around and change their order.

 Most storyboard format editing programs also let you trim your clips to set the correct start and stop points. Some use a separate trim window, while others let you do the trim process on the clip while it is on the storyboard. Some programs offer both while others, that also have a timeline, require that you go to the timeline format to trim, and then when done, you can go back to storyboard.

 Most storyboard video editing programs also enable you to add effects, transitions and titles. While in the storyboard mode, this usually means selecting an effect from the effects window and then dropping it on top of the clip that want to change. For transitions, this usually means picking out a transition and then dropping it between the two clips on the storyboard. As you can imagine, this process differs slightly from one editing program to another, but this is the basic technique.

  Editing using Timeline

 Timeline editing can be very similar to using a storyboard or it can be radically different. – It all depends on how you use the timeline. Some editors prefer to assembly edit all their video clips on a single timeline – basically using the video track as a storyboard format, and then using the other tracks just for special effects, titles and audio. Other editors like the checkerboard approach – alternating scenes on video tracks one and two, with a little overlap between them for transitions.

 Personally, I grew up with the checkerboard approach and like being able to visually see my transitions without having to hit play or preview. Then again, having all the video on a single track does make it easier to keep the clips locked in place when you do insert or ripple edits.

 With both approaches, the editor uses the underlying audio tracks for dialog, sound effects, narration, etc.

 Once you have your production looking the way you want it – you need to save it. The save command does not create a movie, it just creates a database list of what the video files should do when you actually tell the computer to create a movie or to output the digital file. Save often. You don’t want a crash to ruin hours of work. For especially complex and multipart projects, you might want to save multiple copies of the edit database with different dates.

 Output and Sharing

 Once you have saved the database file, it is time to create your finished video movie. Depending on your source materials, editing software and hardware support, you may need to render your production. Rendering means allowing your computer to work from the edit database to create a finished file complete with transitions, effects, music etc. The rendering process is complex and requires a good deal of computer and software horsepower.

 Let’s look at a typical dissolve between two scenes. When you hit render, the software engine starts converting the digital source files to an AVI or similar file format. When a dissolve starts, the computer now has to break down the moving video, frame by frame, down to the pixel layer, mix it with the pixels from the next scene, and then create and save a new video file that is composed with info from both source files. Now add extra layers, wipe or dissolve effects, maybe some titles and of course, mixing in the various audio and music tracks, and you can see how much computer horsepower and time the rendering process can require. 

 Modern day computers, with top of the line software, can do this in real time or even faster. Older computers, with less expensive software, may take a while. A very long while.

 Once rendered and complete, it is time to output and share the finished production. This can be very complex or can be amazingly simple. Most editing programs have a template page with lets you choose between typical sharing choices such as email, web streaming, burn to a DVD, copy back to tape, etc.

 When you pick your output style, you usually get a small selection of choices re quality and size. These pre-made templates usually work well but most programs also enable you to tweak and fine-tune the output file as needed.  This includes deciding how big the image will be, frame rate, image quality, etc. Obviously for email, you want the smallest file sizes and are willing to accept some degradation of the image. For web use, you still want a smaller size. Not as small or low resolution as for email, but smaller and lower resolution than video that is destined for print back to tape or for burning on a DVD.

 The Three Steps

 As you can see, video editing does not have to be complicated. No matter how sophisticated or simple your project, every editing project shares the same basic steps -  capture, assembly and output,