Video: Digital Editing Basics

In this short video, filmmaker Steven Hutchinson gives some advice on lighting your video.

Video Transcript

Hi my name's Steven Hutchinson, I'm a filmmaker and on behalf of FamilyVideos.co.uk I am going to take you through the basics of digital editing.The first thing you must do is get the appropriate lead to link the camcorder to the computer. In this case we'll be using a USB lead, these leads usually come with the camcorders, if not they are affordable pieces of equipment and obviously very important if you want to edit on a computer.There are many software packages on the market, ranging anything from £20-£30 to £700. A lot of computers come fitted with a basic editing package which is geared to towards the home movie maker. These packages are extremely straightforward, everything is pretty much done for you, you just plug your camera in and it'll say 'camera connected'.

All you need to do then is find somewhere on the tape, some footage on the tape, (lets just bring this back a bit) and then there's usually a button somewhere which will say 'Import' and then footage gets stored on the computer in a bank such as this.

Ok I'll stop that there, now with this click I can start editing, and it's literally a drag and drop set up.

Once all of the clips you want to use are in place you are now ready to start cutting and trimming those clips to fine tune your video and make it look just the way you want it.

Most editing packages will have a different way of doing this so you will have to read the instructions for your particular package but they are pretty much the same. Usually there is a layout at the bottom which includes what is called a timeline, which if I was to push play you'll see this marker move across which corresponds with the movement of the video.

If we want to cut that before the camera starts moving we just move the marker to there and cut it and then we can highlight our new edited clip as a separate clip - this is the bit we don't want to use, highlight it and delete and it's that simple.

And then it'll cut to your second clip which is this, I like the closer shot there, so again we'll cut the clip down, get rid of the bit we don't want and there's two shots edited together in a matter of seconds!