Computer Editing: Getting Started in Computer Editing

Jim Stinson
January 2001

The best video editing programs bend over backwards to help you learn them. You get paper manuals, digital references, CD-ROM tutorials, training videos, sample projects and hot links to Web-based assistance. One or two fuddy-duddy companies even offer phone numbers answered by humans. Sooner or later, these helpers can teach you everything you need to know about operating their editing software. But not one of them teaches you how to make a video.
All those dandy training aids are like the book packed with your Acme Giant Carpentry Kit, which explains how to use every tool in your shiny new chest, but doesn't teach you to build so much as a breadboard, let alone a lawn chair or a house. The sad result is that too many folks who made boring incoherent video with their camcorders and VCRs now use editing software to keep right on making boring, incoherent programs. The only difference being that these are now digital boring, incoherent programs.
The cure? For starters, this magazine offers monthly articles on video production techniques, with a lot of emphasis on editing, including this monthly column dedicated to editing techniques. To put these techniques into context, it helps to understand the basic principles that underlie them. With these fundamental principles and the editing techniques they support, you can tap the power of your computer-based editing system to make programs a pro would be proud of.
Cutting to the chase, here are those basic editing principles:
1. Structure. Without a coherent organization, a video is not a program but only a jumble of shots.
2. Simplicity. The better the content, the simpler its presentation tends to be and vice-versa.
3. Brevity. No matter how fine your program may be, no one else is as fascinated with it as you are.
4. Pace. Viewers can digest images extremely fast. Throw your audience new images frequently.
5. Variety. Even at a dizzy pace, too much of the same thing is deadly; and "too much" happens a lot sooner than you might expect.
With our list of principles in front of us, let's look a bit closer at each one in turn.

Your show is a failure if viewers respond, "And your point is...?" Every video needs some form of organization to give it purpose and direction. Programs like training videos have their subjects, and often their structures, built right in; but what can you do to organize Susie's 16th Birthday or Thanksgiving at Grandma's?
One approach is to give the program a working title that announces a theme, like The Great Driver's License Birthday or Grandma Goes Vegetarian. All of a sudden you have built in organizers to guide your shooting and editing.
Even if you don't think up a theme before you shoot, you can often find one when you edit. Were your vacation skies gloomy and gray? Call your video A Good Trip in Bad Weather and start each sequence with a visual reference to leaden skies or pouring rain. The repeated motif will help tie your show together nicely.
Editing a similar travel project, I noticed that, quite by chance, I kept appearing in different chapeaux: an Outback stockman's hat, a trucker's cap, a floppy fishing sun model, etc, etc. In the finished show, I made a freeze frame of the first appearance of each new headgear with a supered title like, Hat Quest Continues or Is This Finally the One? This corny running gag provided all the structure my modest family video required.

Digital newbies are subject to two fatal temptations. First, because they suddenly have the technical capacity to make a feature movie, they think they can make a feature movie. As a former high school teacher, I can't tell you how many student epics I've babysat that were planned to look like Gladiator and ended with amateur actors duking it out on a volleyball court.
Any video more ambitious than a weekend snapshot is work. It can be fun, satisfying work, like say, a hot tennis game, but hard work nonetheless. If the projects you plan are too complex, the resulting videos will be disappointing or never get finished. So begin with simple program concepts and work your way toward more complex efforts.
The second digital tempters are bells and whistles: all the zippy transitions, whizzbang special effects and multiple video/audio tracks just begging to be played with. Resist their entreaties. Making digital whoopee may be a blast for the editor but the results are often confusing, irritating, boring or all three at once for the viewer. Instead of showing off your new digital tricks, use formal elements strictly in support of content. After all, that content is the reason for your show's existence. Your audience can see better digital fireworks during breaks on the six o'clock news.

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