How to Edit Your Home Videos

Digital camcorders have put professional quality video in to the hand of all of us. No more do we have to suffer poor quality images and sound as we review our family events and holidays. The jump in quality over the past few years has been immense.

Not only are colours more accurately captured but also action and sound is much improved to give a much better result. It makes all our home videos look like professional video artists could have produced them. The only thing missing from this great new leap in quality is the editing and video manipulation to match.

What you need

New computers are more than fast enough to manage video editing, and they have the advantage of not degrading the original quality. Because all the editing is done digitally there’s no loss of quality and you can scrub and re-do your edits as many times as you wish.

Editing your video footage on a PC makes thing much simpler but you’ll need to make sure you’ve got plenty of storage space to keep all the footage on. Moving images and sound take up a lot of space, much more than still images, so you’ll need a large hard disk to keep it all on.

Also you’ll need to consider how you’re going to distribute any video. A DVD burner is a great idea as most homes now have access to a DVD player.

Editing software varies in its complexity but there are some great cheaper consumer packages that enable you to do some fantastic stuff. Adding music and titles are fairly basic needs but even the simplest software will let you add special effects to your home movies.

Make A Good Start

You can make your life an awful lot easier by making sure that you capture good video to start with. Some in camera editing can make all the difference between a very long and boring movie to a fast paced and pro movie. Try not to take too much video and use a tripod where you can. Also try not to use the zoom all that much as it makes editing difficult.

Experiment

Once you’ve got all the equipment and raw footage, make a backup of everything and then start splicing your movie together. With a full copy of your video footage you can experiment to your hearts content, safe in the knowledge that should anything go wrong, you can always return to the very start.

Try to tell a story rather than just cutting together all the shots of your holiday and use titles and music to add atmosphere. This will make your movies more impressive and watchable. There’s no point investing is video editing software if you’re not going to use the features to the full.

Be aware that burning video to DVD can be a lengthy process so set aside plenty of time for the final creation of your disk. Finally have fun and try to make your video interesting to watch.