The Video Editing Process
Posted on Tue, Dec 13, 2011 @ 02:43 PM
Do you have video tapes you want to edit, but don’t know where to begin? Mac and PC computers with editing capability enable us all to edit audio and video material but the video editing process can still be a challenge the first time.
An article by Michel Goldman in DV Magazine about the making of Pearl Jam Twenty for PBS’ American Masters series presents some of the challenges even experienced editors encounter. The article, Pearl Jam, Piece by Piece: Editors Sort Through 20 Years of Footage for PBS Documentary recounts an interesting story about how editors sorted through over 3,000 hours of concert and candid footage. The footage came from several sources including MTV, boxes from garages, band members and other sources. The footage was recorded on film and video formats from 35mm, 16mm and Super 8 film, to HDCAM, Betacam, DVD, VHS, Hi8 and various digital files. Film and video footage was transferred to digital video files for editing. The video to digital transfer process was outsourced to a post house. This freed up the editing team to focus on logging and organizing material. A big board was used to lay out the story time line on index cards. The index cards were a crucial organization tool in the video editing process. When the 2 year documentary building process was completed the final deliverables were recorded on HDCAM SR and Digital Betacam.
While your project may not be this large the video editing process is much the same. Whether you have 30 years of corporate video to sort through and edit or 15 years of family videos the tapes are transferred to digital video files and put on a hard drive for editing. When your project is finished, the digital files can be transferred to DVD, Blu-Ray, video tape or internet friendly digital video files.
