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Video Editing : The Kindest Cut of All

The very first person to ever edit any kind of moving picture undoubtedly started by simply removing something they didn't like from the flow of images.

The cut was born. And it was good. Very, very good. Because the cut is the heart of all editing.

It's a way to remove the dull -- to juxtapose one scene against another -- to shorten time -- and generally keep your movie, video or any other form of communication from committing the most cardinal sin of all -- boring your audience.

The key, of course, isn't in simply making any old cut. It's in positioning the cut "precisely" so that it best accomplishes your editing goal.

Look at Figure 1. It's a visual representation of two streams of video. Video A is currently playing in the timeline, and at Point X the figure shows a cut to Video stream B. But beneath even this simple cut, is a remarkably complex set of decisions.

Each of the two streams are moving at 30 frames a second. So even if you're adjusting a cut within one second on each stream, you have 30 frames to choose from in the incoming video times 30 possible cut frames in the outgoing video. That means there are 900 different ways to precisely position this single edit! Now clearly, that much precision isn't necessary for most editing tasks -- but it does help us to understand that editing is a precise craft when practiced at it's best.

And if an edit only affected the two clips themselves, then things would be simple. But in reality, many editing actions a clip can cause changes that potentially "ripple" through your entire video.

Adding even a few frames to the "head" or "tail" of an edit will either "push" all the content before or behind that clip downstream. (See sidebar: Ripple &…