Viewfinder: It's Getting Better All the Time

Editing video is getting better, easier and cheaper all the time. In the twelve years that we've been publishing Videomaker, it is unbelievable how much better editing has become. In the past, there were so many obstacles that made editing more technical than it should have been. As a consequence, people who edited video were required to have a high technical aptitude. Artistic or expressive people (often lacking a high technical ability) were less likely to produce video.

Years ago the camera operator was required to manually set the white balance, focus and set the iris. Today all of these settings occur automatically. Image stabilization and powerful zooming capabilities are also helpful features. When capturing video is so easy, camcorder users tend to collect lots of videotapes that ultimately need to be edited.

Years ago video editing was plagued by the infamous "glitch". This was a disturbance in the video image that lasted only a few seconds. It was enough, however, to brand the finished product "amateur". Glitches occurred at every edit point. It was ridiculous. The flying erase head was the feature that was added to camcorders and VCRs to address this problem. Nowadays, that feature is as elementary as a rewind button. Desktop video editing products never had glitches. However the early DTV devices did include "compression artifacts", that can still be seen today on some DTV…