Computer Editing: Getting Started in Computer Editing (page 2)

Make it snappy. How snappy? As a rule of thumb, five minutes tops. For one thing, short plus simple equals practical: you're far more likely to finish shooting and editing short projects than long ones. For another thing, your viewers are more likely to remain alert and receptive, not to mention present.
What if you shot five hours of tape on your Hawaiian cruise? Sorry. No matter how much it kills you, cull it down to five minutes. All right, maybe ten, but no more than that. You can take it as an iron law that no one else on the planet is even ten percent as interested in your footage as you are. Give viewers only the very best of the very best of those five hours and they'll be pleasantly surprised and lavish in their praise. Force-feed them everything you want to see and you'll say Aloha forever to that group of viewers.

Even if your Hawaiian epic is as fast as a war canoe, it can still act like Novocain if it's nothing but, well, fast. Pace is not synonymous with speed. Pace concerns both the rate and the rhythm of your program material. Just as a succession of similar sentences grows boring, a string of similar shots feels quite dull and mechanical.
So if you assemble a lightning montage of Hilo shopping, follow up with a leisurely survey of lunch. Then perhaps a brisk anthology of the afternoon on a black sand beach and a languorous, tropical sunset. In this respect, a well-paced video is like a musical composition, constantly varying in its speed and energy.
But, you protest, we went wind surfing right after shopping; that's two fast sections in a row. Hey, who cares about when you did what. Move the wind surfing to after lunch, to provide a relief from the speed of the shopping sequence.

The virtues of variety go beyond pacing. It's good to shuffle subject matter as well as sequence intensity. Here again, the trick is to free your mind from the real-world chronology of the original events and re-sequence them to deliver a fresh topic every couple of minutes.
That's right: every two minutes or even less. In a typical ten-minute program, divide it into five to seven sequences. Does that seem way too short? Study commercials to see how much content can be delivered in 30 seconds.
By now, the underlying moral should be obvious: to keep your audiences interested in your shows and coming back for more, make your videos short, sharp and lively. And keep in mind that the awesome capabilities of your new digital system should operate in support of, not instead of, solid content.
The Hawaiian vacation's easy because there's so much to do; but what if you've backpacked the Great Smoky Mountains instead? Hike, camp, hike, camp, hike. In fact, a hiking vacation offers an amazing variety of subjects, but it's up to the director to find and tape them. Apply the principles of structure, simplicity, brevity, pace and variety and watch the magic of organization shape your video.

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