At long last I've finished the holiday video editing. Today I meant to start the actual DVD creation but I forgot my CD's in my girlfriend's car so I'm left with the blog to write. During my first steps at editing I inevitably went through those frustrating mood swings. One minute you want to smash everything in front of you, a minute later you feel like Quentin Tarantino until you actually resize the size of your monitor and end up walking towards the first aid kit to get a surgical blade. All in all I can say that I'm quite satisfied with the final result considering it is my first attempt. The video editing process went something along these lines:-

Selecting Software
The first step was selecting the video editing software. The PC platform is inferior to the Mac in this area, so the limited choice soon boiled down between Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premier Pro. The first to download was Pinnacle so it got the first chance to impress. I managed to start capturing video after a few minutes but from then onwards it was a constant descent. Most of the seemingly interesting parts of the program were disabled and by the time Adobe was installed I had already ditched Pinnacle. Although Adobe is more complex it is more powerful and professional so I'm convinced that I made the right choice.

Video Capture
This step requires a HUGE amount of memory. For digitizing 5 hours of video I used two 40GB hard disks and had to connect another disk to store the rendering information. My computer is now dead slow and I think this will create some serious issues when I come to burn the DVD. The time spent freeing space, fiddling and begging for hard disks was very time consuming and a very bad mistake on my part. The few bucks I saved were lost in time and sleep.

Premier pro has a scene detection mechanism which automatically creates a new clip as soon as a time change (ex. Pause is pressed) is detected. This feature is very useful because I found it much more comfortable to work with many short clips then few long ones. The downside is that it goes haywire as soon as blank space is detected on tape, which happened whenever I did a rewind/play during video taking to check the results on the camcorder. Every time the scene detection mechanism of Premier Pro encountered this blank space a timecode error stopped video capturing. The solution was to rewind a few seconds back and turn off the automatic scene detection.

Scene Selection
Once the video was capture I had to filter between the good, the stupid and the bad. At first when the holiday nostalgia was at its peak, I watched the video being captured to help me choose the right clips. This was not a bad idea especially when editing the video immediately after the capture because it saves time when selecting which scenes are going in the final video.

When capturing video at night with no time left to edit the scenes, I preferred drinking barrels of coffee instead of watching the video capture going on. I'm so liable to change my selection criteria on different days that this approach helped to achieve a more consistent result.

In the beginning I watched each individual clip in the preview monitor to decide whether the clip was acceptable. This was not a very practical approach because when assessing individual clips I was loosing the complete context of the scene. What I ended up doing was drag the whole sequence of clips to the timeline and trim the clips accordingly on the timeline. This saves more time than first watching the clips in the monitor then reviewing them again in the timeline to edit them.

With people asleep in my room I sometimes had to watch clips with muted sound. This was beneficial in some cases because clips with a horrible sound like for example while on a boat or in direct wind didn't get trashed. When viewing these clips with sound you are unconsciously influenced by the bad sound quality and easily discard a good clip which an apt piece of music might heal.

From the first video shot I took I meant to make two versions of the DVD, a family DVD and a cool DVD (uncensored). Regardless of the countless number of times I thought about how cool this would be I didn't categorise the cool discarded clips. Needless say, the cool version is never going see the light because I'm defiantly not going to go through the whole video another time to find the not so socially acceptable clips.

Audio Editing
I think that it’s best to leave video editing as the last part of editing. In some cases you might want a particular audio sequence to fit exactly with video so trims to the video can end by in loosing synchronisation between audio and video.

Watch any TV feature and imagine how dull it will be without music. The same applies to video. Selecting the music clips was very challenging considering my musical tastes and the slow scenes of a holiday video, so I ended up listening to the radio most times of the day for inspiration. The final soundtrack is this:-

1. Lenny Kravitz – Fly away
2. Deep Purple – Smoke on the water
3. The Rasmus – In the shadows
4. No Doubt – Hey Baby
5. Little Mermaid – Under the sea
6. The Beatles – A hard day's night
7. All Saints – Pure shores
8. REM – The great beyond
9. Christina Aguilera – Dirty
10. Relaxed oriental music
11. Jamiroquai – Deeper underground
12. Smashing Pumpkins - The end is the beginning is the end

After the audio editing is complete all that is left is adding titles and clip transitions. Like all video editing packages Adobe has a large selection of video transitions to insert between clips however I took advice from other video editing tutorials and kept transitions to a minimum. As a general rule I added 'fancy' video transitions when changing locations and seamless transitions upon a complete change of environment or scene colour.

Preview
By now I was left with a decent version of the actual result. Until this phase most of the footage was viewed in a very small window at the top of the screen. Now was the time to resize and take a look at the bigger picture. When resizing the PC screen video camera shake multiplied and became so evident that I was despairing with the abysmal video footage I took.

Before taking the suicidal plunge I decided to export the whole sequence to tape and watched the result on TV. Fortunately the picture on TV was more forgiving than the maximised video on my monitor and the colours were much better too. While watching the pre production result I took some final notes for the finishing touches.

Conclusion

This beginner video editing experience made me appreciate TV features and documentaries much more. I caught myself paying attention to TV font captions, clip video transitions, background music and editing mistakes. All in all I think I like video editing and now I'm looking much more than ever for the next holiday. Somebody sponsor me please!!