5 Minute Guide to Video Editing for Beginners

Getting started with video editing is very simple you only need a few items and you can be producing quality movies at home that you will be able to enjoy for many years to come. Maybe even produce a hit Hollywood movie. The basic items you need are a video capture card, the software to edit, your computer, storage space on your computer and a camcorder, VCR, or you can display your movie on your computer screen. The process is effortless, all you do is capture the video to you computer using a capture card, then edit your video with video editing software and then download the video that you edited to either tape or burn it to a VCD, CD, or DVD. Let’s look at your computer first. You will need a minimum of a Pentium II 300 or faster, a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM, but you will get better performance with 512 Megs. You will also desire to have a 30GB drive that is split into 2 separate partitions. This means that you will have a C: and a D:. The C: should be given 10GB and will have all of your software stored there and the D: will be where your audio, video and editing projects are stored. Your graphics card should be a 32 Meg AGP. You can have an 8 or 16 Meg but the quality will not be as good. Storage is probably the most confusing thing about video editing. Video makers have many choices for storing their digital video files and this is why it can be so confusing. If you desire creating your own DVD’s then you are going to need lot of storage. The most you can get out of a single sided 4.7 GB DVD is around 2 hours of video. If you are using DV footage you are going to need 13GB per hour of video, this means you will need 26GB of storage and remember you always have extra footage that you need to factor that in as well so you are now up to 39GB of storage space needed. If you are adding other options such as graphics, MPEG2 footage for the DVD and the folder to hold it all then you are now up to 50GB. So, for your 2 hour movie you will need 50GB of space at least. So, when you begin be sure that you have enough storage on your computer for the type of video that you wish to store. On to the video capture card and the video editing software. When you first visit the electronics store you will find many manufacturers that create video capture cards. The most popular include Some of the reputable video capture card manufacturers are: Pinnacle, Matrox, Dazzle, ADS, Canopus, and Digital Origin. What video capture cards do to put it in simple terms is that these cards use hardware or software compression to digitize your video onto the hard drive on your computer. This way you can edit your video and play it back onto tape or display your movie on your computer screen. Some times, you can purchase the video capture cards along with the video editing software that you choose. Some of the most popular video capture cards that are packaged with video software include the Pinnacle Pro One which comes with the Adobe Premiere 6 full version, TitleDeko RT, DV Tools 2.0, Hollywood FX, and Impressions DVD. The Dazzle DV NOW AV can be purchased along with the Premiere 6 full version and the DVDit LE. Having music along with your video can also be accomplished with a MP3 Converter that will allow you to convert your MP3 music into a wav file or the format in which you need for your video. You may also wish to purchase a MP3 Encoder which will allow you to Wav or other formats into a MP3. A CD ripper is another item that you may wish to purchase that will help with converting your CD’s to MP3, WAV, WMA type files. One other software program that will make you life easier when you begin video editing is a MPEG Encoder which is a very easy to use program that will make converting several formats easy than you can imagine. Many of these MPEG converters will aid in converting DVD, VCD, AVI, MPEG, GIF, Flash, WMV, WMA, WAV, MP3, MP4, M4A, OGG, AAC, 3GP and even more/ So, now all you need to do is to find the best video editing software that you feel comfortable with and off you go. You can find several different video editing software companies that offer their software on a trial basis, this will let you try out the software so you can see if it is the perfect software for you. But, remember with the trial version you will be receiving the video capture card. You will have to purchase it separately.

Beginners guide to PC video editing

If you're new to PC video editing then knowing where to start can be a bit daunting, so hopefully this guide will point you in the right direction. To start with you will need a few items of equipment Camcorders/Video Decks Depending on your requirements or aims there are number of different solutions to discuss, so i will split these up into separate sections. 1.If you are starting from new then i recommend buying a new digital camcorder, this will give you superior video and sound quality as well as making getting started in video editing very simple, so ideal for the beginner. There are thousands to choose from catering for various types of budgets. 2. You may already have an old video deck or camcorder which uses the old analogue outputs such as composite or s-video (be sure to check first what outputs you have). For this kind of setup you would need a capture card/analogue to digital converter, this is discussed in more detail further on in the article. A PC for Video Editing It is now possible to easily capture footage from your Digital Camcorder directly to your PC and edit it. If you looking at buying a new PC or building a new one then the currents spec's are more then powerful enough ,a typical spec PC these days is a P4, 512Mb Ram, 80Gb HDD, Windows XP or something along those lines. You could always use your existing PC if you have one, but i wouldn't recommend using anything below a PIII 600. Additional Hardware When transferring video from your camcorder to your PC there are a number of additional things to consider depending on the type of camcorder your using. If you’re using a digital camcorder then all your need is a firewire card (also known as an IEE1394 card), a lot of current PC's have these as standard now, otherwise you will need to purchase the card separately. Some of these will come bundled with editing software such as Adobe Premiere but this really depends on which card you buy and how much you spend, once your camcorder is connected to your firewire port windows will automatically recognise your Digital Camcorder. If your using the old analogue camcorder then you will also need an analogue to digital converter, see the section on video editing cards below. Speed? Its worth considering your Pc's Processor speed, the speed will effect the rate your video will encode, encoding is where your DV video clips are converted into a more compressed format, for example DVD's are encoded to MPEG2. So the faster the better really. Also consider the amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb would be the minimum. Extra Hard Drive Storage Its worth considering having an extra dedicated drive for your video footage, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GB of hard drive space so consider a large capacity hard drive such as an 80Gb or 120Gb, also consider the disk drive RPM, at least 7200RPM would be recommended. If your PC supports it (most new ones do now), then a Serial ATA (SATA) drive will offer increased date transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec compared to 100 or 133 offered by the IDE drives, you may also consider a SCSI drive if you’re PC has an SCSI adapter as standard. DVD/CD Burners If your planning on putting your film onto CD-ROM (VCD), or DVD then a CDRW or DVDRW is an essential piece of kit, most new pc's may have a CDRW or DVDRW as standard, to burn your DVD, you'll need DVD authoring software. Video Editing Cards If you have and older analogue video camera/deck then an analogue USB or PCI capture cards will suffice. These dedicated analogue to digital converters take process of conversion away from the CPU and therefore speeds up transfer. If worth getting a quality capture card as the cheaper cards can produce mixed results, The Video Editing Software This is where all your creative work starts and the creative work starts, you can capture video from your camera, edit the captured clips, arrange them into a sequence, add transitions, credits and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready export your movie back to the camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD, VCD etc).