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What You Need:
In the past, video editing required the use of special arrays of electronics
designed specifically for the task of managing the video edits. Many studiobased
systems—including some still in use today—are linear editing systems,
which are more or less limited because video can be cut and spliced only
as you move from frame to frame and sequence to sequence. For the most
part, this sort of editing requires that you have recorded your elements
mostly in sequence (or that you build a rough cut of that sequence, which
is simply a pasting together of the main elements of your video or film in
the sequence in which they’ll appear) and that you then intercut, overlay,
or otherwise edit your video and audio within the time constraints of your
rough cut. Of course, some human editors are adept at linear editing and
don’t find it all that limiting.
Computer-based editing systems allow nonlinear editing (NLE). In this
case, you don’t necessarily need a physical rough cut of your presentation;
instead, you can work with clips stored in various places. Once those clips
are digitized (turned into digital computer files), you can apply a time-honored
computing tradition to the world of video editing—cut and paste. In other
words, with NLE, you’ve got a bunch of flexibility when it comes to how you
shoot your video, how you arrange it after it’s shot, and how you ultimately
cut the video together and add titles, transitions, effects, and so on.
The editing process has become relatively less expensive over the past
few years. Whereas professional-quality NLE systems were tens if not
hundreds of thousands of dollars just a decade ago, the steady march of
computing technology has changed that over time, so that even analog
NLE systems can be acquired for perhaps only a few thousands dollars
over the initial investment in your computer.
Digital video (DV) has changed that equation even more. By offering
near-professional quality (some say it’s perfectly fine for professional use)
in a form that is already digitized, a DV camcorder makes it possible to do
nonlinear editing for free with software that ships with many computer
systems (using Windows MovieMaker and Apple’s iMovie). You can edit at
a prosumer or even professional level for well less than $1000 by adding
software to a computer that’s equipped with an IEEE 1394 port and enough
processing power to run the editing software. That’s just about all it takes.
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