The Fastest Way to Video Editing
Your digital camera may look a bit like mine: beat up and scratched from bouncing around in your bag. Or perhaps it’s impeccably shiny because you actually have a camera case. Either way, those “inside parts” still function quite well. So well in fact, you’ve decided that being a filmmaker is your new calling. So now here you are with a plump video collection on your memory card. If you have a Canon your videos are likely in .avi (Microsoft) format and if you have a Kodak you’ve probably got .mov (Apple) files. Different camera manufacturers choose either of these formats most often, though I am not sure of their personal reasons. But no matter the file formats your camera creates, you can work with them easily and it’s no sweat.
After transferring the video files to your computer, what’s next? Here you are with a folder full of random clips and not sure where to begin. I had previous experience with Adobe Premiere so I downloaded the trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. It really looked exactly the same.
By selecting “File > Import” you can repeatedly import several video files to work with. Then you can movie them around (get it?) where you like, delete certain parts (razoring) and easily add special transitions between clips. It’s also very easy to add text titles to distinguish changes of scene. However, my problem with Premiere Pro comes at the end of the process when you are ready to export the finished file. It’s not easy or intuitive. I had a 17-minute video which took 2 hours to render into a new .avi file. And still, after all of that time, the file was over 1 GB in size - hardly web friendly. I tried lowering the quality many times and changing different settings. It just wasn’t making much sense but I figured I would have to download different “codecs” for compression. But this brings the question: why aren’t the “good ones” already included to make this all easier? I decided to try saving my video as .mov instead of .avi. Maybe this would provide an easier way and better compression. Or maybe not. Open output… what? Well we can possibly blame Windows Vista for this.
This is when I went directly to the source. For $29.99 (as compared to hundreds of dollars for Adobe products) you can purchase a QuickTime Pro license which adds editing features to your existing install of QuickTime Player. I grabbed the huge 1 GB completed movie and imported it into QuickTime, re-exported it as a .mov and the file was a healthy but much smaller 132 MB. This was more like it. There’s also so many other options when exporting your movie with QuickTime which I’ll get into in later. So start practicing until next time!
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