Hollywood, Bollywood, and now, (insert your name here)wood! When you've got a digital video camera (or a phone that can shoot video for that matter), the cinematic adventures of your life can be captured with magnificent soundtracks, story lines, plots-imagine what you can do! With the advent of YouTube, Blinkx, Google video-and about a zillion other video-sharing sites-personal videos are in demand. Whatever you want to show-super mundane videos, tear jerkers, crazy stunts, animals gone wild, or just stuff that makes you laugh-people want to see it, and sometimes Hollywood will even pay you for it.
Whether you're sharing it with the online universe or just with friends and family, let's talk about what you can do with the wonderful world of video editing.
So video editing...sounds complicated. Capturing the video is the easy part right? Point, shoot, and that's a wrap! Then you sit down to watch it and it might be choppy, or maybe you spent too much time shooting the birthday cake, or the transition between birthday cake and birthday boy is all wrong. With video editing you can delete portions of your video that you don't like, move scenes closer together, combine multiple videos together into one, change color and contrast, or even add a soundtrack and the cast and crew credits!
Now, before you start thinking to yourself, "ok, that definitely sounds complicated," consider this: there's great software out there-even free software-designed to take the scary and complicated parts out. You know, the parts that would make those of us with day jobs wonder how on earth we could ever find the time to even take on such an endeavor. In an ideal world, you should be able to edit quickly and intuitively with a click of the mouse, right? Right. So here's what you can accomplish with just a click.
The hack job. Say you have 2 hours of video you need to reduce to one hour, or your family-being as kind and tolerant as they are-will start to snooze. When you open your 2-hour-long video in a typical editing program, it will split your video into shorter, more manageable clips. In addition, it will also organize your video into "collections" based on when you started and stopped footage. By breaking your video up, you can view a thumbnail collection of stills and drag and drop them in the order in which you want them to appear in your finished video.
You can also cut out the stuff you don't want-like when you're moving around like a whirling dervish attempting to catch everyone and everything in the room-by viewing a clip's timeline. That's the amount of time that a clip plays before it's completed. In that timeline you'll see frame by frame what's happening in a thumbnail view and, with a click, you can simply delete the frames you don't want.
Sounding less scary? Yes! Let's move on.
Special effects. Your video is coming along smashingly. You've removed the unnecessary stuff and have the ideal foundation for a movie that friends, family, and possibly the entire online universe are just dying to see. Now it's time to add special effects and smooth out transitions between scenes and frames. For instance, say you want to zoom in on a particular person as she walks into her surprise birthday party-the tears, the joy, the raw emotion of the moment! You can, using simple point-and-click commands that draw the scene in to where you want it.
Or maybe you want to transition from one scene to another by fading out of one and into the next. It doesn't have to be a simple fade, either. You can fade out of one scene and into the next using shapes. For instance, imagine a pinhole that grows larger and larger as one scene takes over the other, like the lens of a camera getting farther and farther away.
You can also play with light and contrast. Do you want your entire movie to be in black and white? Sepia tone? The grainy appearance of a long-lost film reel? These options are all available with just a click and your video-editing software.
Opening and closing your video with a bang. Just like a movie out of Hollywood, you can add the title to your brilliant creation, written commentary (and auditory commentary, but we'll get to that in a moment) throughout as well as the end credits. While in the thumbnail view of scenes, you can create a title page or insert a page within the video-wherever you want-and it's as if you're typing in a word processing program. Super easy and intuitive! Add text, even text animations-your movie, your words, with the click of a mouse!
Adding narration and finally, the soundtrack! By connecting a microphone to your computer, you can narrate your video, including each timeline within your video. Adding your narration to a clip can be as easy as clicking the Start Recording and Stop Recording buttons within your video editor.
Now, one of the most important things you can do in a movie to emphasize a moment in time-whether happy or sad-is to add the universal language of music. The great thing about having a computer is that you can burn your CDs directly to the hard drive , or download MP3s from sites like iTunes*, Rhapsody*, or Napster*. You want to make your audience cry with joy when they see that person walk into the room for her surprise party? Zoom in on her face, then drive that moment home with music. With your video-editing software you'll be able to import your music, and use it where you want within each scene. Point, click, brilliant movie.
Your finished masterpiece. Once you've finished, all you need to do is save the movie to your computer. And guess what? You're now a video-editing superstar! With your amazing video and your choice of fantastically simple-to-use video-editing software, you can create a home movie fit for a king and queen-and actually if the king or queen is online, they might very well see it.
I'll see you at the movies!
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