Previous Image « » Next Image

Editing: Editing from Start to Finish, Part 2 of 4

Last month, we covered the preliminary planning you need to do before you begin your video project. And we outlined a typical workflow for logging and capturing the clips that will form the building blocks of our family history video. This month, we move on to building our timeline, ordering and trimming our individual clips and then previewing the results to check the pacing for our program.

Unlike narrative work such as a play or narrative movie, the kind of family history highlights video we're planning doesn't come with a predefined story arc. Therefore, we'll need to establish our goals for ordering our clips in some kind of sensible flow. For our program, we'll lay our clips on the timeline in a rough chronological order, with the oldest photos and clips first.

The simplest way to get our clips onto the timeline is often just to drag them from their bins onto the timeline one at a time. If you've been careful with your clip names, you can often automate some of this process by moving clips onto the timeline in batches, especially for material that is ordered chronologically.

Many editors are set up to insert batches of files onto the timeline in the order of their names. This is a powerful function since you can roughly pre-order your clips by simply naming them in groups. For example, a clip titled 01-001 will be placed on the timeline directly ahead of one titled 01-002. After the numbers, you can name the files with something more descriptive to help you remember. Most editing software also lets you add comments to the database that makes up your clip bin, so go ahead and use that if you find it useful.

Most editors also have a way to pre-set the duration of a still. The result of our batch insert of the Section One still shots will be a series of 6-second clips on the timeline.

Next, we'll insert the video clips for section one onto the timeline. If there are pre-built title screens, other graphics, sound effects or whatever, they get placed on our timeline next. We'll need to start paying attention to the different tracks on the timeline so that titles that will be superimposed over video will be displayed prope…