Video editing for beginners

PSA Journal, August, 1991 by Howard Lindenmeyer

Suppose that you have just returned from a trip to some exotic, scenic location, and you used your new camcorder. You have several hours of video, that you are anxious to show your family and friends. There is some very good footage in your video cassettes and some horrible stuff. Like you forgot to turn off the camcorder a couple of times and photographed your walking feet; or you forgot to reset the white balance after shooting the night's entertainment; or someone walked in front of your camera, or some scenes were far too long and others out of focus.

You invite your captive audience to your show and proceed to fast forward past most of the bad stuff and most of the not so good footage as you brag about the scenes coming up. Lo and behold, your entire audience has exited to the kitchen, and you wonder why. The answer is simple, your production needs editing. You have no right to bore your family and friends with raw video footage. Very soon you will have no friends at all.

In perhaps it's simplest form, editing video tape can be described as doing the best that you can with the equipment you have. Suppose that you have only a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder); try editing out the commercials while you are viewing and recording one of your favorite motion pictures from off the air. Simply press the pause button to stop recording until the commercial is through, then press the pause button again to resume recording. Of course, you do not want to use the start-stop switches to do that because you'll louse up your recording with horrible glitches.

All that video editing actually accomplishes is systematically transfering certain selected video pictures and audio sound signals from one or more electronic sources to a video tape recorder (VTR) or video cassette recorder (VCR), in order to achieve a more pleasing combination of sights and sounds. Your goal should be to do it so good, that your friends and club members will enjoy seeing it a second time, or even better, want a copy of your work. Much depends on your skill as a video editor.

Suppose now that you have only an ordinary VCR and a video camera and you are ready to do something with that very good footage that you shot on your trip. It's a good idea to first make a log of all the scenes in each cassette involved, noting a brief description of the material, the appropriate footage or real-time counter indication and some sort of quality indication like G, F or B for good, fair and bad.

Select the good scenes and number them in the order that they aTe to appear in the final production. Usually one should consider opening with the most exciting footage available in order to grab the audience interest at the onset, keeping in mind that the establishing shots and introduction of the main characters are important to the final production.

Now that you have completed your editing script, it's time to have fun re-recording the selected material from the camcorder onto the VCR. You might want to use the same exciting opening shot again as an ending shot. That is easy with video, so are montages of the best footage as a closer. Montages are most effective if all of the scenes are the same length, or declining in length as excitement builds up. You might even want to eliminate some unwanted sounds like wind noise. Just pull the audio out cable from the camcorder connection and record only the video signal. You might also want to add your own music and narration later. That is called audio dubbing, and it can become complicated. Meanwhile just have fun by re-recording only the best and eliminating the worst of your video and audio signals by a well planned system of video editing. Ed. Note: Some early models do not have the capability of separate track recording, so if you record only the video, you cannot record sound later without harming the video track. Please check your manuals before attempting adding sound only later.)