If you intend to display your video footage to anyone else, you will most certainly want to edit the material first. The simple act of arranging your shots and cutting parts that really aren’t that good or interesting can take the art of home made videos to another level entirely. One that will not bore but actually entertain the audience.
That is the reason video editing software something worth investigating properly.
Editing and manipulating video is a demanding task that requires a powerful computer. A high end personal computer is usually good enough, but always bear in mind that without adequate performance, you will start to get grey hairs rather quickly.
Unlike let’s say word processing, video editing is a hard-drive intensive task and you will definitely want to have at least a couple of gigabytes of RAM memory to work with. Using up 60 GB of hard drive space for just one project is certainly not unheard of – particularly if you start playing with material shot in high definition. It really is a wonderful advancement of technology that you can do professional film cutting on a home computer these days, but it still holds true that the more memory your computer has and the faster your CPU is, the smoother (and more enjoyable) the job will be.
Editing film used to be a very demanding and time consuming task, as it was something that was either done physically to the actual film or at least moved about on video tape. The invention of powerful computers changed all that, as the concept of nonlinear editing was conceived. NLE retains all the possibilities of classic editing while allowing for much greater speed, flexibility and ease of use. It is truly computers at their best.
There are many video editing software applications out there, both free and commercial ones, for both Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh. As for Linux, video editing is still one of the weaker aspects of the operating system, but the situation may of course improve at any time.
Digital video certainly is the medium of the 21st century, and nowadays it is available to almost everyone. With the range of options from quickly capturing something on a mobile phone to making your very own, well arranged mini-movie set complete with a high-definition camera, there certainly are many possibilities for creativity. And the end result can be published on anything from online video sharing sites like YouTube to state of the art (currently) Blu-ray discs.
Thus, hopefully intriguing digital short films can be produced by more people than at any earlier time, using a digital camera and high quality video editing software.
And to think that this has been possible only for the last decade or so.
