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 shot.

A VCR never starts recording instantly. If you transfer footage by simultaneously pressing PLAY on the source deck, and RECORD on the assembly deck, playback on the source deck will start at once, but your tape in the assembly deck won't begin recording for another one or two seconds. As a result, those first seconds will always be missing from the edited tape.

To avoid this problem, you first need to figure out how long the recording delay (called "runup") is on your particular VCR. There are ways to calculate runup precisely, but let's keep it simple: start by assuming a 1.5 second recording delay and then adjust the time you wait between starting the assembly deck and the source deck by trial and error. Here's how to do it:

1. Position the assembly tape at the last frame of the shot before your planned edit(using slow motion controls, if you have them) and press PAUSE. Then, press RECORD on the assembly deck so that the readout (on the deck or TV screen) says RECORD/PAUSE.
2. Position the source tape on the first frame of the shot you want to put into your edited tape and press PAUSE. Then, reset the counter to zero, and rewind the source deck to negative ten (-10).
3. Place one finger on the PAUSE or PLAY button of each deck (some brands of VCRs resume playing or recording by pressing PLAY instead of pressing PAUSE a second time).
4. Start playback on the source deck, and eyeball the moving counter: -10, -9, -8, -7, -6...
5. Just after minus two unpause the assembly deck.

If your deck has a two second delay, actual recording will begin when the source deck hits 0, which is the first desired frame of the new shot. If it doesn't start recording until say +3 you're still ok. The edit started after where you wanted, you can just try again. But, if it started on 1 you're in trouble. You've just lost a second of your program; you may have to start over. You should practice on a test tape and get your timing down as well as possible before trying to edit an important program.

With experience, you won't need to zero the source deck counter, and you can start your countdown wherever you want to make an edit. For example, if the shot you want to put into your tape starts at 5:14, and your deck has a two second delay, back the source tape up to 5:04, count down from there, and start recording at 5:12.

This sounds more complicated than it is to do. Try it a few times, and you'll soon find you can precisely begin recording where you want. So precisely, that you can have a door start opening at the end of one shot, then, in perfectly matched action, continue its swing in the next shot.

So, the runup problem is easy to solve. Unfortunately, the problem of putting a shot in the middle of a program that ruins the picture isn't as easy to fix. In fact, the only simple solution is: don't try to replace footage in the middle of the edited program--at least not on regular home equipment.

The reason: before it records a shot, the VCR erases the part of the tape it is going to use. Making sure it's nice and clean. Unfortunately, it erases a few seconds beyond the end point of the new shot. That's no problem if the rest of the tape is blank; but if some video is already recorded there, the VCR erases its opening seconds, leaving the garbage you see when you play it back (Figure 2).

What about the problem of wavering rainbow lines marring the opening of brand new shots (Figure 3)? Most home VCRs cannot avoid them. Your only choice is to ignore those brief rainbows. Otherwise, you couldn't edit your raw footage at all.

Or could you?

If you're willing to invest $400-$600 in a new VCR, you can get one with flying erase heads. Decks with flying erase heads make perfect, rainbow-free edits every time. The more expensive decks are fitted with special recording controls called INSERT and DUB, which let you replace shots in the middle of a show! By using DUB, instead of RECORD, you can replace the sound without disturbing the picture (great for music or narration). Or, by using INSERT, you can replace a section of picture without erasing the existing audio. Most VCRs with flying erase heads also let you use the INSERT and DUB features together, to replace both picture and sound.

If you don't want to buy a new VCR, don't worry, you probably have flying erase heads already--on your camcorder.

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