Videography Tips and Techniques

Issue 1 Tip 5

Editing

So you purchased all the fancy camera stuff and you’ve taken some video and you’re watching it looking at all the horrible things gone wrong. It’s Blairwitch all over again. OK, good thing you purchased editing software. Maybe you can edit out the good shots and throw away all the other junk. So which editing software should you buy? Well, that’s all personal preference of course. Software cost money. For example if you want to use Apples Final Cut Pro, you’ll need an Apple Computer. You can buy, like I did, software from the manufacture of your camera. My HD Video Camera is a Sony HDR-HC9 so I chose to buy Sony Vegas Pro 64bit on Windows 7. I also purchased a Quad processor, 8 GB RAM, etc for the performance. See, rendering the edited video is what will take time. For a 30 minute video with music, rendering in the highest resolution as possible could take hours. Make sure you are ready to render before you render, else any corrections and you’ll have to render again. Think of rendering as a way to take the raw footage and produce a single video from it.

Editing is an art and it takes skill. I believe if you are shooting video, you should be involved with the editing. I believe this for a number of reasons. First, it gives you insight as to what you can/should be doing during filming. for example, if you find your shots are not steady, you may look at ways to steady the shot. Perhaps holding the camera a different way while filming or perhaps brace it on a tripod. You may take shots a little longer than needed just to make sure you have enough footage to work with. As a general rule, while shooting, try and spend about 8 or more seconds filming a subject. When you think you’ve got enough, shoot a little more. You can always edit out, but can never add what you haven’t shot.

Back to editing. Once you get the hang of the software, filming and editing will work hand and hand. You will begin to see subjects from the eyes of the videographer as well as editor. The more you film and practice and observe, the better you become. Learn you camera and learn youe editing software. Together along with your experiences, you will produce video that you and other will come to love to watch with anticipation of when the next video will be available.

Larry

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