WHY EDIT YOUR VIDEO?
Most home videographers only pull the camcorder out for special occasions or holiday trips. Therefore, experience in shooting compelling footage is limited. Meanwhile, others video everything that moves, leaving you to sit through hours of footage in the hope of witnessing the few video gems captured. Editing your video can help both the occasional user and video fanatics weed out the footage that's likely to put your audience to sleep.
NON-LINEAR V LINEAR EDITING
Anyone who has used a VCR to move video camera footage from a camcorder to another videotape has already performed a basic linear edit. Linear editing involves moving footage from one tape to another by copying and recording, usually without using a computer at all. However, if you are new to video editing and just want to make a movie' simply and quickly, Non Linear Editing (NLE) is the way to go. This way, you'll be editing video footage that has been digitised (that is, a video-capture card in a PC has converted the video signal from a camcorder into a format that your PC will understand).
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ANALOG AND DIGITAL VIDEOIf you are using a Digital Video (DV) camcorder, you need a FireWire port to get the video footage into your PC or Mac. With DV, the movement from camcorder to computer, and back again, doesn't involve any loss of quality. Video shot with the DV camcorder is converted to a digital signal within the camera, which means the FireWire port in the PC or Mac is performing a file transfer, not a video conversion transfer.
It is worth remembering this important distinction between digital and analog camcorders if you're in the market for a new camera. Analog capture cards are needed for use with analog camcorders and DV camcorders need a FireWire card to work.
DIGITAL VIDEO AND FIREWIRE
Typical DV cameras can be remote-controlled via FireWire, using software such as Apple's Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere 5.1. FireWire has an additional media-specific feature - isochronous transfer, which guarantees that the data travelling across the cable will always have enough bandwidth. This is critical for video and audio applications, because if the bandwidth drops below a certain threshold, you may lose frames.
NLE CAPTURE CARDS AND SYSTEMS
If you want to do NLE, you need a capture card. Issues in deciding what card to get include: the NLE software you prefer, the camcorder you have or want, the platform you are on (Mac/PC), the output quality you want and, lastly, your budget. Remember to strike a balance between an NLE solution that will grow with you and a system that you know you will never use to its full potential.
ANALOG CAPTURE CARDS
Analog capture cards have regular video and S-video inputs and outputs. The less expensive boards without audio are susceptible to audio-sync issues, especially when making videos that are more than five minutes long.
Iomega Buz Multimedia Producer
Iomega Buz is a great budget solution and comes with the handy Buz Box, an easily accessible breakout box that sits on your desktop to serve as a single connection for your camcorder and audio devices. The Buz Box includes I/O connections for S-video, composite video and stereo audio.
The Ultra SCSI controller is also a handy addition, and the software package includes MGI VideoWave SE editing software, PictureWorks, HotShots and Iomega's RecordIt!
Iomega Buz Multimedia Producer
Price: $339
Iomega
Phone: (02) 9955 2455
URL: www.iomega.com
Pinnacle Studio DC10+
The Studio DC10+ is a powerful capture card bundled with Pinnacle's easy-to-use Studio non-linear editor. While the Studio software is simple, it does offer a full range of features including titling, special effects and timeline playback. The software isn't as powerful or professional as Premiere, but this card is a great place to start digital video editing.
Pinnacle Studio DC10+
Price: $699
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
Pinnacle Studio MP10
You get the same features here as you do with the Studio DC10+, but the video format is MPEG-1. This means it is ideal for the Web, presentation and CD-ROM. The video output quality to tape is actually quite good for MPEG-1, but still nowhere near as good as you'd get from the DC10+. Studio MP10 includes a light version of Minerva Impression CD Authoring software, which lets you create a basic interactive CD.
Pinnacle Studio MP10
Price: $699
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
miroVIDEO DC30 plus - Win95/98
The miroVIDEO DC30 plus offers bus mastering, ensuring video data rates up to 8MBps and the potential for low compression rates - adjustable down to 2.2:1. There's full support for PAL at 768 x 576 resolution, with on-board audio hardware ensuring lip-sync editing in CD audio quality. A unique feature is the rendering acceleration, which increases the productivity when producing video. A full version of Adobe Premiere 5.1 is included.miroVIDEO DC30 plus Price: $1999Lakovision Phone: 1800 657 601URL: www.lakovision.com.auDV/FIREWIRE CARDSThe most important thing to understand when comparing all these DV cards is this: DV in = DV out. As a result, all the DV/FireWire cards on the market deliver identical video quality and all of them have identical video specs - 720 x 576 image size, 29.97 frames per second, and a data rate of 3.6MBps. With all of these cards, you need 1GB of storage for each 4.5 minutes of digital video.
ADS Pyro
The Pyro DV card ships with Ulead Video Studio 4.0, a simple, user-friendly NLE program. Currently the Pyro will not work with Premiere, or even Ulead's full-featured Media Studio Pro software. The Pyro is also strictly a Win98 product.
ADS Pyro
Price: $380
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
Digital Origin Edit DV 1.6 for Windows
Edit DV has a great feature called Draft DV, which creates a smaller-resolution file of every DV clip you use in a project. These files are a quarter the size and require a quarter the throughput, which gives you much faster previews, even with titles, transitions and filters. Once you are finished editing, you switch back to full DV mode and let the final video render out.
Digital Origin Edit DV 1.6
Price: $1235 ($1999 including FireWire card)Conexus Phone: (02) 9975 2799URL: www.conexus.com.auPinnacle DV200What sets the DV200 apart from the other low-end cards is that it gives you the complete DV Tools utility that lets you autoscan, log and batch-capture your DV footage. The DV200 is the perfect addition for DC30/30+/30pro owners wanting to migrate to DV.
Pinnacle DV200
Price: $1199
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
Pinnacle DV300
The DV300 is Pinnacle's full-featured DV card. It ships with Premiere 5.1, TitleDeko, Pixelan SpiceRack, DV tools and INSTANT video. The DV300 hardware has an Adaptec UW SCSI controller built on. This feature was necessary just a couple of years ago because, at that time, all the DV cards required SCSI drives for video storage. Today, that is no longer the case, so the built-on SCSI is not the important feature it once was. Still, if you are building a machine with SCSI drives and peripherals, the DV300 is a great choice.
Pinnacle DV300
Price: $1499
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
NON LINEAR EDITING SOFTWARE
NLE applications allow you to work with the video that you've captured to your hard drive. Jazzy title sequences, professional effects and those great page turns and wipes you see on documentaries can all be performed on your home PC. Although all applications on the market basically do the same thing - edit video - there are huge differences in the features on offer. One of the following applications should suit your needs, although you may need to upgrade to more professional applications as you become more adept.
Ulead VideoStudio 4.0
With Ulead VideoStudio 4.0, capturing video is a simple matter with DV device control. You can play, pause, fast-forward, rewind, frame-advance, frame-reverse and stop DV and Digital-8 (D8) camcorders with a click of your mouse. Capture settings are automatically configured through video project templates, making the whole digitising experience quick and painless.
Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 integrates with GoMotion from Ligos Technology, allowing scalable MPEG-2 compression that delivers high-quality video at lower data rates with no added compression hardware. A standard PC can now compress video that will play back in any PC DVD-ROM or MPEG-2 player at full resolution and full frame rate. With Ulead's proprietary SmartRender technology built in, Ulead VideoStudio will allow frame-accurate editing of MPEG-2/MPEG-1, DV and other video files without first decoding and then re-encoding them. Combining these two technologies creates one of the fastest, high-quality video editing solutions available in any price range.
Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 can also import MP3 audio files for background music and sound effects in video productions. It will even give users the option to output audio only (*.WAV).
Other features include unlimited title pages to produce scrolling credits, and the ability to copy music data directly from CDs at a much higher quality than recording through PC sound cards.
Ulead VideoStudio 4.0
Price: $199 (Upgrade $129)
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
MGI VideoWave III
This is the main competitor to VideoStudio 4.0, and has also adopted DV technologies in an attempt to take advantage of the huge upsurge in FireWire/iLINK interest.
MGI VideoWave III includes support for DV and also includes SmartDV, a technology that accelerates DV production, while maintaining high-quality results. The new release also lets users work with video in MPEG-2, the universal standard format for broadcast. Templates for capturing, editing and publishing movies should also help you beat that empty-timeline problem that new users often encounter.
The software includes a new set of underlying drivers that supports most FireWire cards, making the process of getting DV into and out of a computer simply a matter of connecting the camera to the PC and running MGI's software. There are no special configuration settings required, regardless of which combination of camcorder, IEEE-1394 card or PC the user has.
MGI VideoWave III makes it even easier to capture, edit and publish videos in AVI, MPEG (1 and 2), DV and Web video formats. New capture and publishing templates make the video production process easier for both beginners and advanced users. The templates enable new users to simply select the hardware they have and the type of video output they want, without having to figure out and adjust complex settings, such as frame rates and codecs. More advanced users can edit or create their own templates.
MGI VideoWave III now includes StoryLine templates, for such events as birthday parties, weddings, graduations, and even business presentations, providing tips and tricks for making better, more interesting videos.
MGI VideoWave III
Price: $100
GT Interactive
Phone: (02) 9902 3000
URL: www.videowave.com/vw3
Media Studio Pro 5.2
On the Windows platform, Ulead Media Studio Pro 5.2 supports very high-quality output (with subpixel rendering) and precise editing using PAL television drop-frame timing (29.97 frames per second). Media Studio has the same kind of sophisticated motion and envelope control as Premiere, and features some of the same high-end editing tools, such as ripple edits and proxies.
Rather than including video-capture, editing, titling, audio-editing, and image-editing functions in one big program, Media Studio provides several programs within a suite.
CG Infinity is a powerful titler and text animator that lets you add sophisticated surfaces, motion paths, and envelopes to your text, or to mix text with vector graphics. Video Paint is designed to apply a paint layer to any frame in a video clip, or to an entire sequence of frames. It also includes traditional animation tools such as onion skin, which shows a dimmed version of previous animation frames in the background of the current frame. Video Paint is such a powerful tool that many users would find it alone worth the price of the entire package. But, of course, Ulead also gives you full-featured video- and audio-editor modules.
You can now insert MPEG-1 files into the timeline and edit them as you would any other file. You can also read MPEG-1 files from video CDs.
Media Studio Pro 5.2
Price: $799 (Upgrade $380)
Lakovision
Phone: 1800 657 601
URL: www.lakovision.com.au
Adobe Premiere 5.1
The latest version of the world's most-used editing software delivers an elegant interface and superb tools for producing high-quality movies for video, multimedia or the Web on a PC or Mac. The new interface is a radical move from the previous version and answers many of the criticisms editors had previously levelled at the benchmark program.
Some of the new features welcomed by editors included the ability to view source clips and edited footage simultaneously in the Monitor window, being able to perform three-point edits using the Source/Program controls in the Monitor window, and enhanced audio management and sweetening. Better text, titling and credit operation, a Trim Mode to precisely edit two clips in relation to each other, plus insert, overlay buttons to quickly position source clips on the timeline all make a market-leading application an even more compelling choice. Many of the video-capture cards offer a full version of Premiere 5.1 included in the purchase price, making the entry into NLE a less costly experience. Multi-threaded performance with dual processors mean faster compilation times, which helps Premiere stay ahead of the competition.
Core QuickTime support allows users to produce streaming audio for the Web with QuickTime 3.0 audio compression, which enables them to export Qdesign and Qualcomm audio formats, among others, from within Premiere 5.1. Users can also choose to work natively in the DV format, with the ability to import .dv files from QuickTime into Premiere 5.1. In addition, core support in Premiere 5.1 allows users to take advantage of the built-in effects of QuickTime 4, with the release of a QuickTime 4 effects plug-in from Adobe.
Adobe Premiere 5.1
Price: $1295
Phone: 1300 550 205
URL: www.pacific.adobe.com
Final Cut Pro
Apple has provided Final Cut Pro with a 3D look and feel similar to that found in its new QuickTime 4.0 and Movie Player interfaces. FCP's interface offers separate windows for media management, timeline, source and destination monitors, each with transport controls that allow control of an input DV camcorder or VCR. A simple toolbar sits in the lower right-hand part of the screen.
Three-point editing, slip editing, rolling and ripple edits and match-frame editing can be either a mouse-based process of drag-and-drop editing or, for more experienced editors, a keyboard-based editing process.
Final Cut Pro supports up to 99 video and 99 audio channels. Despite this complex depth of potential compositing tools, the program's timeline stays remarkably tidy, thanks to the nested sequences feature and because separate channels are not required for transitions. Transition effects are applied directly to the border between two scenes, and they appear as another piece of media on the timeline. Most editors will see this as a great improvement over Premiere's screen-hungry transitions track.
Final Cut Pro's list of features will very likely impress even the most demanding of editors. The program offers an excellent implementation of features with a great interface and it's a program that is, in fact, easy to learn and operate. There is no question that Apple has designed FCP to appeal to professional editors from the outset, with the aim of also attracting everyone from multimedia producers through to the serious enthusiast or consumer.
Experienced and novice users alike will find the interface intuitive. It's great to have the compositing tools included and, once you get the key-framing function right, the ability to create titles and filter effects is better than many other comparable packages.
Final Cut Pro is a robust program with a serious set of features that will be irresistible to editors who want a fast, efficient workflow.
Apple Final Cut Pro
Price: $1599
Phone: 13 3622
URL: www.apple.com.au
