"Check out this awesome video!" bellowed Chet from across the yard. He was waving a DVD at me. "It's of the Gollywog Hotel being dynamited last week to make way for the new bypass! I took my family down for a picnic!"

If I hadn't been laying in a lawn chair daydreaming I could have pretended that I had something pressing I needed to attend to, but as it was, I couldn't think of a good excuse, so I let him come in and we popped in the DVD. And hey, construction workers dynamiting an old eyesore, how boring could that be? Thirty minutes later, I knew how boring it could be.

"You have some good footage Chet," I said, "you really do. You paid careful attention to camera angles and moves, your camera stabilizing work is really good, you shot multiple views of the implosion with telephoto and wide angle lenses, but your pacing ruins this whole thing."

He looked crestfallen. "Pacing?" he said glumly.

"You spend twenty-nine minutes and fifty-five seconds on getting your family to the hotel and five seconds of the implosion. What you need to do is take control of the perception of time in your video. Unless you just got hired to edit "24" very few things need to happen in 'real time.' "

Chet looked intrigued, so I went on.

Don't Drag the Compelling Content

In life there are the interesting moments and there are the dull moments. We imagine that while James Bond spends a certain amount of time jumping from bridges and karate chopping assassins he also has some amount of down-time back at Universal Exports writing up reports and making tea, but we tend not to see those moments because people watch 007 movies for the car chases and explosions. One of the important jobs of the screenwriter, the director, and the editor is to figure out what to show and what not to show in order to carry the story along at a pace that's comfortable and entertaining to the audience. Much of this weight falls on the editor - even wonderfully written and beautifully shot scenes can cause a movie to drag interminably if not well edited. Depending on the situation, a director may want to speed time up or slow it down.

Speeding Things Up

One of the most common problems with amateur video comes from leaving in what would better be cut out. If your family packs a picnic lunch, and piles into a car to drive somewhere, you don't need to show the whole thing. A good editor can boil it down into key parts that convey the entire meaning - a knife cutting a tomato, a sandwich being wrapped, a basket closing, the family getting into a car, someone looking out a window, a map on a seat, a car pulling to a stop. Sometimes in movies, directors need to get characters across weeks, months, or years very quickly to keep the story from dragging. One common way of doing this is through a "video montage" sequence where short, representational scenes are shown and our minds fill in the rest.