Edit Suite: Making a Video Album

Turn your home videos into family keepsakes.

If you're like many casual video shooters, you have five, ten, or maybe even 20 tapes of birthdays, holidays and vacations sitting on a shelf.

Sitting on a shelf unwatched.

Unwatched because they're much too long and therefore boring --because, in short, they're unedited. You know you should cut and polish these diamonds in the rough, but every time you review a tape, you quit in despair because you don't know where to begin.

So here's a ridiculously easy approach to simple video editing: pretend that each tape is an envelope full of color prints and you're going to select, arrange and mount the best of these "prints" --actually, individual video shots-- in a photo album.

Of course you can't really lay out video shots on a table like photo prints, but you can do this instead: zero your VCR counter at the beginning of the tape and make a list of shots, jotting down the counter reading from the start of each shot.

NOTE: this Edit Suite is about organizing your program material for editing. For advice on how to cable equipment together and actually transfer shots from the original camera tape to the edited copy, see Videomaker's January 1998 Edit Suite column.

A Family Picnic
Figure One shows all 24 shots in an imaginary epic we'll call A Family Picnic, laid out on the table just like they came back from the photo developers. I know, these photos aren't unbearably exciting, but the rest of this tutorial depends on them, so please take a moment to carefully review them.

First, assume that Mom, Dad, Junior and Sis all took turns using the camcorder, because every family member appears in at least some shots. Next, notice that the camcorder really has been used like a snapshot camera, recording whatever caught people's attention, without any discernible plan. Finally, note that some shots are out of focus, poorly composed or redundant--just like prints from a typical roll of film.

Now check out the events that were recorded. Shots 1 through 5 show the picnic's beginning. We don't see the family actually arrive, because no one's outside the car to record its entrance. However, Mom did get a shot (represented by frames 3 and 4) of Dad moving the car to a shadier parking spot. Remember these frames for later.

Everybody was starving, so they ate right away, with Dad demonstrating, as usual, how to convert ground cow into chemically pure carbon. Frames 6 through 11 capture the whole breathtaking process.

After lunch, the family took a nice walk in the woods. This expedition was just chockablock with fun events, as shown in frames 12 through 20. Junior was so cute when he jumped from behind a tree yelling "Boo!" in frame 9 that Dad had him repeat the gag to get a better shot of it (frame 20).

Pooped from all this excitement, the family relaxed on the grass for a while (frames 21 through 23). Then Sis finally got a chance to use the camcorder as Mom and Dad packed up the picnic supplies and loaded them in the car (frame 24). A day of pulse-pounding action, yes siree!

In fact, you're bored with this picnic already, though you've been looking at it for only five minutes on the page instead of 30 on a TV screen, If this were actual video footage, you can see why you might set out to edit it, then sigh and replace it on the shelf, untouched.

Don't give up on A Family Picnic yet, because we're about to see how to quickly shape this incoherent footage into a nice little program by selecting "photos" for our "album". There's a right way and a wrong way to go about this, so let's look briefly at the wrong way first.

Subtractive Editing
Some people edit snapshots by simply pulling the bad shots and eliminating as many duplicates as they can bear to part with, which isn't all that many. Then they stick the remaining snapshots in an album, keeping them in their original in-camera order. That's why some people's albums can seem like a fan, because you're turning the pages so fast to wade through them that you create a nice little breeze.

You see, the approach that subtracts just the bad or duplicate shots can't turn a fistful of prints into a coherent show. The product may be a bit shorter and prettier but it's still just a bunch of shots. To verify this, look at Figure One again, and this time notice that frames 1, 3, 4, 9, 19 and 23 have been marked with an "X" to indicate that they've been discarded to produce a show edited by the subtractive method.

The result? As you can see, it's 6 shots shorter than the uncut version. However, it's still arrival, lunch, walk, rest and departure, and within each of these sequences, the shots are still in a fairly random order.

Instead of editing this way, we need to recognize that every "album" starts out dead blank, with no shots in it whatever. The key to creating an interesting video lies in starting with nothing and then adding one shot at a time to build the video.

Additive Editing
The additive approach involves three steps:

1. Determine the best order for the various sequences.

2. Do the same for the shots within each sequence.

3. Select only the shots needed to tell the story of each sequence.