Editing Home Video

It's not that difficult to set up a digital video editing system and start editing within 1 hour if you are familiar with computers. But you WILL encounter problems sooner or later. You'd better know the basics of digital video editing to make your editing life easier.

Just what is Digital or Desktop Video Editing?

Simply put, Digital Video Editing, or Desktop Video (DTV) Editing, is using your computer to edit videos. Today, computers are so fast and storage is so cheap that you can capture your video directly from your camcorder to your computer, edit it, add all kinds of cool titles, filters, transitions and special effects or FX. Then you can output back to tape, onto the web or even onto a CD or DVD. Although different technically, Digital/Desktop Video Editing is the same as Non-Linear Editing (NLE) for most practical purposes.

What is Non Linear Editing?

Non Linear Editing (NLE) is editing using random-access video storage. It means you can get access to your footages from hard drive randomly and instantly. The video files on your hard drive are just like normal film clips, you can load, watch, manipulate, any part of the file in a non-linear mode. Instead of using jog shuttles and special video decks, you simply capture the video to your hard drive. You can then edit and rearrange the shots much like moving paragraphs around in your word processing program. Since the video is digitized, you can instantly get to any exact point in the video. Non-linear editing is based on a timeline. Each shot is placed on the timeline. You can put more than one track of video and audio onto the timeline.

The best part about NLE is the effects

. It's only limited by your own imagination and the software you choose. You can add special filters to clean up and restore picture quality, or to place ripples or swirls in the video. Much of this comes with your choice of NLE. You can also purchase separately effects that will allow you to create awesome transitions between shots.

Then comes titling and graphics

You can use any Windows true type font, so foreign languages are no problem at all. You can add a logo or computer graphic or even animation. In fact, you can make it fly, slide, fade in, bounce, or spin onto the video.

Add Some Cool Plug-Ins

You can also add cool plug-ins to your NLE and create awesome 3D transitions and effects. Adobe has some really great software some of which is quite expensive. For the home user, I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements for photos and Adobe Premiere Elements and you will have the bases covered. The list price for each of these is $89.95 but the street price is significantly less. If you check Amazon.com, you can find a better price including a bundle (Both programs) at a significant savings.