Video Production - Aspect III - Post Production or Editing

After you've shot your 'raw footage', it's time to bring everything together into a coherent, entertaining, and motivating plan. Considering that we're living in the digital age, it's very likely that you'll be editing your system on your personal computer. There are distinctive levels of editing software and considering the fact that this is about making a skilled corporate video, I focus on the expert system that we use at Video One particular Productions, named Final Reduce Pro (FCP). It is only offered on the Mac.

I've employed Media one hundred, Premier, Pinnacle, and FCP editing software, and they all operate along equivalent lines, be we favor FCP mainly because it offers us extra bang for the buck and it has a reasonably intuitive interface.

Though we use FCP, we use other computer software that specialize in specific tasks that are necessary for experienced editing and post production. We use Photoshop and Illustrator to make graphics and manipulate still photos that we want to import into FCP Soundtrack Pro and Sound Loops to generate music and sound effects Live Kind for text effects Just after Effects and Motion to apply specific effects to the edited footage and Studio Pro to author the DVD's that include the programs we edit.

Pixel Film Studios The initial activity is to get the footage you shot into the laptop or computer by digitizing the footage into a useable file format. Normally, the material is transferred to your computer system through a firewire cable which goes from your camcorder or 'source' deck to the laptop. Try not to use your camcorder as your supply deck, to feed the footage into the laptop or computer, as camcorders have smaller motors and are not designed to be used as tape players. Getting a player will add to your expense out front, but will save you revenue if you don't have to replace your camera since you burned it out making use of it for anything it wasn't intended to be applied for.

When you digitize the footage with FCP, it gets converted into a QuickTime file. This file can then be dragged into the timeline so that you can edit your piece. The timeline is exactly where your video gets displayed and edited. It is the pallet of your video function of art so to speak.

There are a assortment of tools you can use to move, reduce, slow down, speed up or do other factors to the footage. You also have text effects tools, video transitions and a host of particular effects to enhance your video. I'm not going to give you a tutorial on FCP, but I will talk about some of the do's and do not of efficient editing.

When you have acquired your footage, you can either digitize the footage your self or have a organization digitize it for you. If you go the latter route, the enterprise should digitize it to an internal hard drive of theirs and then transfer it to your external hard drive. Then you can transfer the footage from your external difficult drive to your internal drive. You under no circumstances want to capture or edit to an external challenging drive, as the throughput is not enough to move the video. If the throughput isn't rapidly adequate, you'll get stuttering video or the system or computer may crash.

There are now external hard drives that you can capture and edit to. But unless you have an external hard drive with a firewire 800 interface, play it secure and edit from your internal drive. Not to get also technical, but your external drive demands a serial ATA connection and an IDE or Ultra ATA difficult drive that goes at least 7200 RPM to edit video. If you have that mixture, you can capture and edit video on that drive with no problems. Of course your personal computer will have to have the firewire 800 interface and be fast enough to deal with video as properly.

Don't overlook to max out on RAM. You never ever have enough RAM in your laptop. And you'll need to have it to edit video.

If you're editing video to an internal drive on your computer system, it is recommended that you use one particular internal drive for your applications, technique, and so on. and a further internal drive for your video projects. We've had the best luck editing video on Hitachi internal drives.

No matter what drive you use, for optimal performance, and to stop crashes, make certain you have at least ten% totally free space on the drive at all instances. Internal tough drives are low-cost these days, so get the biggest one particular you can. You'll be amazed at how quick you use up the space.

Let's speak about the video plan itself. Men and women who are new to video editing often go overboard. Do not go crazy with the particular effects, use of wild transitions, or really feel that the text you use has to fly in each time. If something, error on the side of conservatism. If you do not, you run the threat of fatiguing your audience with overkill. And that's the final factor you want to do. In reality, making use of cuts in among shots is often extra effective than any transition, particularly a wild and crazy one particular.

This is not to say that your video doesn't need to move along. In fact, a rule of thumb is that you must almost certainly have a new shot each and every 5 seconds. Of course, it depends on the nature of the shot. If an individual is giving a 20 second testimonial, probably you can dissolve up the them, and then possibly following 5 seconds, bring up some text in the reduced portion of the screen, identifying the speaker by name, title and business. This achieves the effect of informing the audience as to who the speaker is and it adjustments up the shot to generate visual interest.

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Speaking of text, make certain it's title protected, which is another phrase for producing positive it fits inside the boundaries of the television screen. Your editing system must have a guide someplace in a menu that will show you how far the screen extends. When you're developing text, the boundary can be superimposed over the screen. This tool shows you precisely where it is 'safe' to location text. If the text goes beyond the protected region, it will be chopped off and won't seem on the tv screen.

The final issue I'll mention is sound. You will have to make certain that the sound level is constant all through the video. The viewer will surely turn it off if the audio is uneven. It will have to be consistently loud enough to hear, but low adequate to be continual and not startling to the viewer. So no matter how lengthy the plan is, go through the entire system and tweak the audio, producing it louder or softer where required. Your plan need to have tools to do this.