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Working with Digital Video:
After you’ve put together your computer and software, you’re ready to
consider how you’re going to get that video from the camera into your
software, get it edited, and then get it back out of the software to an easily
viewable format. Fortunately, all of that is relatively easy to do. Because
digital video is stored as a computer file on the camcorder’s tape (which is
usually MiniDV tape but might be another format such as Digital8 or
DVCAM), the process of capturing video from a digital camera is as
simple as copying the file from your camera to the appropriate software
program (see Figure 2.5).
After the digital video footage is captured (again, think copied) to the
computer, you can edit it in your software. Digital video editing software
will generally leave your original files intact, creating project files that
rearrange the video into clips or on timelines, at least until a certain
rendering phase takes place. At that point, the video data is collected and
sometimes rewritten into new files, or “printed” back to videotape or to a
similar media.
With many computer-based editing programs, that video will spend its
entire time on the computer in the DV Stream format, which is the same
format used by the camcorder and imported into the computer. Once the
edits are complete, you can export back to your DV camcorder, which can
then be used to play the video on a television, transfer it to an analog VCR
and so on. Or, you can leave the computer files stored on your computer
for playback on-screen.
Sometimes, however, you may have good reason to not only store the
video on your computer, but also to change the file format. And, in the
process of editing your video, you may find that you’ve got other video
clips to deal with that are already in a different format. In that case, you’ll
want to know a little something about the various video file formats, which
are discussed next.
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