Written by When producing video for some sort of public viewing, editing is one of the most important steps. Put really simply this is the process of cutting portions of the video, while deleting other parts and, changing the sequence of shots in such a way that you actually tell a story instead of just showing a series of loosely related shots.
Therefore the best video editing software shouldn’t be overlooked.
Editing and manipulating video is a demanding task that requires a powerful computer. A high end personal computer is usually good enough, but always bear in mind that without adequate performance, you will start to get grey hairs rather quickly.
Unlike let’s say word processing, video editing is a hard-drive intensive task and you will definitely want to have at least a couple of gigabytes of RAM memory to work with. Using up 60 GB of hard drive space for just one project is certainly not unheard of – particularly if you start playing with material shot in high definition. It really is a wonderful advancement of technology that you can do professional film cutting on a home computer these days, but it still holds true that the more memory your computer has and the faster your CPU is, the smoother (and more enjoyable) the job will be.
Editing film used to be a very demanding and time consuming task, as it was something that was either done physically to the actual film or at least moved about on video tape. The invention of powerful computers changed all that, as the concept of nonlinear editing was conceived. NLE retains all the possibilities of classic editing while allowing for much greater speed, flexibility and ease of use. It is truly computers at their best.
There are many video editing software applications out there, both free and commercial ones, for both Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh. As for Linux, video editing is still one of the weaker aspects of the operating system, but the situation may of course improve at any time.
What with the immense popularity of video sharing sites like Youtube, it is not an exaggeration to say that digital video is THE medium of contemporary society. If a picture says more than a thousand words, how much can then be said with digitally edited video and audio? And as there now exists more gadgets than ever before that allow virtually anyone to capture action on film, the creative possibilities are almost endless. Wether the end product is a HD blu-ray disc or a short snipped on a video sharing site doesn’t really matter.
Thus, hopefully interesting digital short films can be created by more people than at any earlier time, using a digital camera and high quality video editing software.
And to think that this has been possible only for the last decade or so.
