Video Editing Without Software

Perhaps you've cabled your camcorder to your VCR and tried to edit one or two videos, and now you wonder if it's really worth the hassle, because:

• The first few seconds of every shot were completely missing, or
• The opening seconds of several shots were marred by wavering rainbow lines, or
• When you replaced a shot in the middle of your tape, the start of the following shot broke up into lines and visual garbage.

These are common gremlins that interfere with crash cutting. Crash cutting, or "two-fingered editing," is editing by simply copying selected shots, in order, to a new tape.

To ensure that we're talking about the same thing, take a look at the crash cutting edit setup in figure one. The VCR used to play back your original footage is called the source deck (your camcorder works fine for this purpose). The VCR used to build your program is called the assembly deck. Your assembly deck is probably your humble, hardworking home VCR, on furlough from playing rental movies.

Actually, bare-bones cutting systems work well if you know how to get around their limitations. Let's start with the easiest problem to work around: restoring the first couple of seconds to the start of every…