Computer Editing: Getting Started in Computer Editing

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…