Premiere

Video is one of the most engaging and effective communication tools available today and many people are already making amateur videos for friends and family. Digital video editing on a computer allows you to improve the quality of videos so that they can begin to approach professional quality. Digital video editing is also great fun but you should be warned: it is expensive in both time and money. In my experience, editing video takes at least as long as it took to film the original footage. For example, for every hour of video that you might have filmed on vacation, editing is likely to take you at least one additional hour.

Adobe Premiere is the most famous digital video editing tool available and can do almost all the special effects you can imagine .. and more. Click HERE for the official Adobe site. Screenshots and instructions here are based on Premiere 5.1 but later versions should be very similar.

Before you do any work with computer files you should be aware that video files are often very large. Files downloaded from a digital (DV) video camera, for example, represent 3.56 MB per second of video. This is equivalent to about 200 MB per minute or 10GB per hour and since you should allow the same amount of space for the editing process editing an entire one hour DV video would require 20GB of free space on your hard disk! Note that your computer must be able to import and export DV signals if you wish to edit DV files - this usually means purchasing a DV editing card such as those produced by Pinnacle for a few hundred € or a few hundred USD. Your DV camera must also be able to both output and input DV signals.

To avoid the space requirements of DV, you can also work with low resolution, low frame rate videos (frame rate = number of images per second so low frame rate = jerky video). Many digital 'still' cameras can also make short low resolution videos that can easily downloaded to your computer, probably in MPEG format. These can be edited and then incorporated into other programs or emailed or added to web pages.

Two warnings: I have always found digital video editing to be a frustratingly unreliable experience - Premiere often crashes, particularly at the moment of attempting to export the final edited video file. This problem can be minimized if you save your work very often. The project file associated with each editing project is actually very small and quick to save - that's because it's not actually a video file, instead it is a set of instructions that tell Premiere how to compile the video.

Also, I have found that video files, whatever format they are in, are quite often 'badly formed' such that they might work in one context but not another. For example, an AVI file that fails to open in the Windows Media Player might still open in Premiere. Or a QuickTime movie in an Internet web page might not be compatible with Premiere once downloaded.