Viewfinder: On the Brink

Sometime this year, you will witness the most profound change that has ever taken place in the pursuit of home video production. Since the development of the first camcorders, Videomaker has been reporting on interesting developments in the consumer video industry. Nothing we have ever covered in the history of the magazine compares with what will happen this year. The end result will be that editing video will become very easy for anyone to accomplish and millions of people will begin to do so. In addition, it will soon become very easy to distribute the final video program to millions of people.

In 1999, we expect to see most major PC manufacturers offer at least one affordably priced computer with video editing capabilities pre-installed. This will make video editing easier and potentially more affordable than ever before.

In the early days of home video, editing was very difficult to do well. Consumer VCRs were originally built to record TV shows off the air or playback pre-recorded videotapes. Manufacturers did not include features that helped users copy selected scenes from a camcorder or another VCR. Whenever someone attempted to copy selected shots to a home VCR, a "glitch" (a slight imperfection) would appear between each scene. The quality of the video was poor because the first VCRs were not developed with the assumption that users would make copies of copies of videotapes. Generation loss was a major problem. These two problems were addressed in recent years with the advent of home VCRs designed for editing, as well as higher quality camcorder formats (S-VHS, Hi8…