A friend of mine wants to produce a “documentary” for her friends whose wedding party she is in. It’ll be about them specifically, and love and marriage generally. She’s got some fun ideas and it should be interesting, I hope.
I’ve agreed to help her since she’s woefully inept at computer-y things. I’ve also never done anything of the sort, so we’re really starting from scratch here.
I’m hoping you good and experienced folks can tell me what I need to know about digital video editing.
We have a video camera. Everything else after that is up in the air. My friend’s budget is absolutely minimal, so we need to go as affordable as possible. I will either invest in a video card that has RCA jacks (I assume such a thing is available) so we can upload it to my compter.
So, is there any extremely affordable, consumer-aimed (that is, maybe not feature-rich, but also not difficult to learn) software for video and audio editing that is reasonably good? We’ll want to take various clips from what we’ve taped and edit it, at times add music or voice-over, etc.
Then, we’ll need to play it at the wedding.
I have a Pentium IV, 1.5 GHz with 256 Meg of RAM. Should this suffice for speed and such?
It’s just like your word processor, select cut and paste, or select and delete.
You’ve got a little slider doohickey at the bottom of your playback in pretty much whatever diggyvideo-editing sw you’re using, which represents your insertion point as well as “this is the part playing back in the video window right now”. So you move the insertion point to the start of a sequence you want to select, hold down the shift key and drag to the end of what you want to select*. Now you can cut or copy or delete that selection. Let’s say you copy it. Open a new empty video document and paste, and you have just the piece you copied out from the original. Now find another clip you want and select and copy it, too, and paste it at the end of the first clip in your other document, and now you’ve got two clips you like, one following the other, without all the boring detritus in between. Got that?
In some software, you have little indicators you can drag to the progress bar to mark “starting point” and “ending point” rather than using shift-and-drag. The indicator thingies make it easier to make tiny changes in your starting point without having to re-try your selection attempt. Same basic idea, though — you’re creating a selected area in the video the same as you’d select part of a paragraph in your favorite word processor, which you can also do in more than one way (click-and-drag or click / shift-click).
OK, now…the problem is, you’ve now got all the video bits and pieces you want, in the order you want them, thanks to the power of select and copy and paste, but when you do playback you get these ugly abrupt transitions, right?
So you play around in the menus and you try out different transition effects. Fade to black and then fade the next one in from black. Or have the screen wipe right to left, replacing the last few frames of the previous sequence with the first few frames of the next.
Same with the audio, you may want some audio continuity that keeps going even as one video sequence ends and the next begins, like theme music or a voice-over or something. So you play with the menus and see how you can do an audio track separate from the existing one with people’s voices on it.
Everything else is pretty much just elaboration and extension of those themes.
First off, your system: CPU and RAM are okay, but you will need a good chunk of disk space. Video takes a lot of space. I don’t know how much raw footage you’re looking at. But when you start to upload it, take note of how much space you have left (don’t just upload hours of video without checking).
Software: I broke my teeth on Adobe Premiere. It is quite intimidating, but also very powerful. I slogged my way through some basic stuff, but then got stuck on some others. Not sure I’d recommend it for your first time out. But not having any first-hand knowledge of what else is out there, I can’t recommend anything. You might look into Pinnacle, but again, I don’ t know how it compares to Premiere.
Ahunter’s description is pretty accurate for a general overview of how the tools work. Putting the clips together and organizing them into a sequence is pretty straightforward. Transitions from clip to clip can be straightforward, or can be a pain. I would say that where things get a little hairy is adding/replacing audio.
Some things I learned from my first experiences:
Take the time to review your raw material and make notes of what clips you want where. That is, map out your video before you start messing with it with the tool. You’ll likely change a lot of stuff once you get going, but start out with some semblance of a plan before jumping in.
Take some time to experiment/learn the tool before diving into the project. Don’t make your project your learning exercise. It’s easier (and faster) to mess around with short little clips to try stuff out.
When all else fails, buy the book. I finally broke down and bought a book to fill in the gaps. The documentation that was provided wasn’t the easiest to get to just what I wanted to find out. It did take some searching to find a good book, but it has paid off (time savings).
It is a slow process. Each reprocessing of the editted video takes a while. Premiere was pretty good at only processing the new material (the changes from the last reprocess). But still it will take a while. Don’t put it off intending to cram it all in in a short time - better to chip away every night for a number of weeks.
THE single biggest issue with editting has little to do with the tool or your proficiency at it. The single biggest issue will be your stamina/patience to sit through reviewing THE SAME segments over and over. This is especially difficult once you add music - you will learn to absolutely loathe whatever music you put on and will never want to hear it again ! Editting is a very try-this-see-how-it-looks process. So you will be reviewing the same footage many many times. Be prepared to get really tired of seeing the stuff over and over again.
