It's also critical to learn to see the big picture, even when you're working on the smallest edit. With the kind of precision control that modern software offers you, it's easy to get caught up in trimming a frame here or a frame there and forget to stand back and watch a complicated sequence in its entirety.

There's nothing more frustrating than working for an hour on a small sequence, tuning it up until it's nearly perfect, and then discovering that your video is too long. Then you have to face the realization that the best thing you can do for your video is to simply remove the entire section that you've just perfected. Be cruel and merciless and cut where you can.

So, the bottom line for editing is that there is not one right way to do it. The whole object of the exercise is to arrange and trim your material in a way the keeps your audience involved in the presentation. Accomplish that, and your edit is right. No matter how you got there.

Next Month: Graphic it! Altering the Material and Adding Titles and Graphics.

Contributing Editor Bill Davis owns and operates a video production company in Arizona.

Modern editors don't need to render material on the timeline that remains unaltered. If you ever find yourself rendering even the simplest cuts-only sequences, you need to check your project settings. The problem is likely that your clip settings don't match the capture settings you established when you opened up your new project. In most situations, you should only have to render title sequences and transitions between clips.

Every editing system works a bit differently in terms of specifying what kind of edit you're doing when you drop new material over old. In some modes, you'll insert the new into the old, pushing the previous material downstream (i.e. ripple edit). In another mode, the same action might simply place the new content on a new timeline layer, overwriting the old clips with the new ones. Both kinds of editing actions are valuable and as you get to know your software package, you'll learn how to switch among the various editing modes.

There are often a number of ways to select multiple clips and move them as a group on the timeline. In the most usable software programs, the technique mirrors the behavior of your operating system. In other words: CTRL+click (OPTION+click on a Mac) to select multiple individual clips. You can also click and drag a selection area around your multiple clips in some environments or SHIFT+click to select a range on a Windows PC. Some editors have other kinds of selection tools that allow you to move clips more efficiently.

Editing: Editing from Start to Finish, Part 3 of 4