Basic Training: Editing 101
There are two people on Earth who want to watch all the raw footage of that wedding video you shot last week. You, because you think you're the most amazing cinematographer you've ever met, and the bride's mom, because she wants to complain about all the stuff you missed. Everybody else is going to fade after about 30 minutes.
In this context, "editing" means editing video with a computer - what is called "Non-Linear" editing. This just means that you do not have to scroll through your whole tape to grab a scene from it; you can access it randomly. There are linear editors, but they fell out of common usage a decade ago, and mostly only news gathering TV stations do tape-to-tape editing anymore. At the very least, to edit video, you need:
a) a video capture device,
b) a computer with NLE software, and
c) a place to store your video.
Many modern computers contain everything you need to get started right out of the box. A DV camera will interface with your computer and digitize your video, which you can store on your internal hard disk and edit with software such as iMovie (on a Mac) or Windows Movie Maker (on a PC). You can get fancier by upgrading any one of the three as your work calls for…
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