Video Editing Tips

Most people think of video editing as costly jobs done by studios who specialize in such jobs, well partly yes and no. If one wants broadcast quality movies and sound all mixed up for a presentation for showing at a solemn event such as a wedding, that would be a great idea, but there are tons upon tons of resources out there that are available for free to aid you in getting acceptable video with nice sounds and effects out off the internet. Do a quick search of video editing tools and video editing how to and you get tons of tips and tricks from home movie makers like you and experts alike. You even get to download some of the best free stuff off the net from reliable download sites such as Pcworld and ZDnet. You’ll also need some time to learn them but no worry for there are tutorials that come with the downloads.

Now that you’ve decided to do your editing, it would be nice to know a little of the facts so you get the overall picture in terms of Video processing and the required space you need on your hard drive. Digital Video runs at a bitrates of around 3.5 megabytes per second so your input feed requires:

2 hours * 3600seconds/hour * 3.5 megabytes per second = more or less 25 Gigabytes.

You would also need to store your final MPEG-2 files on your hard disk before you burn them onto DVD’s and DVD’s typically have a 4.5 Megabit/sec bit rate for video and 0.4 Megabits/sec which sums up to :

4.5 Mbit/sec + 0.5 Mbit/sec = 5 Mbit/sec translating to 0.625 Mbytes/sec
2*3600*0.625= 4.5 Gigabytes

So 30 Gigabytes of hard disk space is needed for editing two hours of Digital Video and the subsequent DVD burning process and that is a lot.

As mentioned in the past post, the type of processor you might have on your computer can influence the success of your venture into the realm of video editing. The processor or CPU of your computer must be able to handle the many complex operations such as editing and rendering coupled with ample amounts of physical memory or RAM and hard disk space. Editing video requires the video editing software (which by itself uses a lot of ram and hard disk space) requires speed or else frames might be lost during the copy, edit and rendering process. Transmission of information from your camera to the PC through the Firewire cable runs at around 400/800 or 3,200 Mbits/second depending on the revision level your PC supports, it can support any of the aforementioned speeds.

If you do have a digital camera, chances are that you will have a port marked DV or Firewire port. This is a port that uses transmission control protocol that is optimized for transmission of video and audio information from devices such as digital still cameras and digital video cameras. The Firewire standard has long been favored by video enthusiasts and experts alike for it allows fast copy of video data from a recording device to a host computer. If your computer does not have the Firewire port, then you simply buy an add-on card that plugs into the expansion slots to give you the said capability. There are also other factors to consider when doing video editing and manipulation such as processor speed, memory and hard disk space which will all be discussed in the following posts. All of the above mentioned computer parts have the capability of making or breaking your attempts at successfully editing video.

There are several effects that your software may have asides from the usual conversion tools that allow analog video to be turned into digital format. These software usually have effects for transitions and fade in/out features and many more making the transition from shot to shot easy to transition. Without these facilities it would be like cutting and pasting video from the analog source to the destination and would be a waste of time. If you do have the time to burn, learn on how to maximize the software so you get the full potential and use of all the functions.

The makings of a good video edit are a combination of nice video transitions and of course seamless audio. Yes this is a video editing site but who wants video without the audio part? There are two ways of getting or converting analog to digital, a converter that automatically converts the analog signals into digital format then directly saving it into your pc or installing a video card that has the facility to accept video from an external source. In analog, there are two specific areas to edit the video itself and the audio part. Since analog devices recorded both on the same track that would be very hard to separate and edit. Digital video has distinct tracks, one for the video data and the other for the audio data. These can be imported independently so editing is a breeze.

There are tons of Video capture and editing software on the market and some of them are even free. Try to go to review sites that provide feedback from users and then do some more investigating by going to the developer�s site and finding out more about the specs, built-in effects and all that you can find out from them. After going through several of these software you can now rank them and make your choice on which to purchase and use. And a note to consider, the video card that you purchased may have some bundled software of its own so try it out and if it works for you there would be no need for additional purchase of separate software.

DVD conversion requires a lot of computational operations which would be no wonder that conversion of 45 minutes of video to take around 8 to 10 hours. Termed lossy video encoding, it has high requirements on processing, memory and storage that it does indeed take hours upon hours of processing. Encoding in either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, movies take up to 10 hours. Just a tip, try doing your editing during the daytime and then the encoding process during the rest of the night, you might also want to turn off the screensaver and sleep/hibernate functions of your motherboard so you don’t end up throwing it out the window as you wake up expecting a finished conversion only to find a snoozing computer.

There are a lot of factors that have to be satisfied from which none is actually accomplished but satisfying most will result in a decent length of film. Do plan ahead for the planning allows you to get to know the area and gets you to find the best places to take shots from. It might not have anything to do with editing but it sure helps with the amount of material you need for that perfectly edited video. If you are going to film solemn moments like baptisms, weddings and other formal activities, do plan to go to the venue so you can familiarize yourself with the person who is in charge (priest, rabbi….) so you get to introduce yourself. Try to establish a rapport so you get to ask the do’s and don’ts of the ceremony. You get to show respect and are allowed to film during the event itself without getting thrown out as a nuisance.

Ask any professional videographer and they would always tell you that for a 2-hour length of processed video, they would have taken more than twice that and from all the best angles. Also, most videographer work in teams from two to more depending on the price for they allow the coverage of events from all angles, a relevant and important shot may suddenly have the subjects move in a way that the view of one camera is obscured with another to take over giving the shot continuity. You can overcome this by combining video with still shots as fill in’s to prevent gaps or jumps from scene to scene and venue to venue. There should also be a lot of shots of the background and venues well before the event for not even the celebrants get to see the in their full splendor.