For years I’ve been collecting gigabytes of home movies that I simply will never have time to sit down and watch. Potentially, I have thousands of hours worth of home movies. Between my video camera, phone, digital camera and all the other devices I own nine ways of recording video.
My problem is that I will never have enough time to view all the videos. With a lot of extra time on my hands this past month, I decided to explore the idea of creating a compilation video. In other words, editing all the footage to a few hours.
From birthday parties alone I have twenty two hours of video footage. Of course, it would be really boring to sit down and watch all twenty two hours. However, it would be really enjoyable to hit play on a one hour DVD. Even with a DVD, I will still hold onto the original videos.
Video editing used to be something for the experienced or wealthy. Six years ago when I opened my store a customer brought in a very old editing machine and tablet. She valued the computer around $10,000.00. For the average home user a $10,000.00 computer is a little farfetched. Armed with a better-than-average computer, most users can become editing pros for under $100.00.
Video editing software ranges from free to very expensive and most does a pretty decent job. Microsoft Windows includes a copy of Movie Maker which advanced users may find limiting. Pinnacle Studio HD is about $50.00 in stores and is a near professional quality editing package. If you pick the wrong software you may be limited.
Video producers in the making should expect pretty similar features for under $100.00. All commercial software has a preview pane, editing panel, transitions feature, and titling built-in. Advanced features like green screen and special effects are sometimes available in low cost editing packages; however, usually aren’t available until you purchase higher end software.
Video clips from your camera can be dragged and dropped directly into the software. Depending on the package you choose, each clip can be manipulated using simple mouse clicks. I took a ten minute clip and reduced it to about two minutes of video I wanted to keep. Each clip can then be stitched to others in the software timeline and voila, you have a video.
Well, it’s not quite a video yet. Most people will want to add some type of title so the videos can be easily organized. I use a lot of captions in my videos which appear throughout the video so it’s easy for others to know some basic information about the content. For example, in a recent birthday video I might write something like, “14 candles.” It takes seconds to write something and place it where you want.
Although most computers can easily handle the editing task, most have a difficult time with the final process called rendering. Rendering is the procedure of taking all the video clips and combining them into one finished video. The PC I use for editing is a quad core with eight gigabytes of memory. Believe me when I tell you that I use almost 100% of my processing power during the rendering process.
Most people won’t want to leave the finished videos on their PC because it’s an inconvenience. Many people have PC’s connected to their television, but not most. Truly finalizing the project for most people will mean burning their project to DVD. All the software I tested has the ability to author to DVD with very nice menus once the project is finalized. With regards to my personal project, I would have to say the most fun has been reviewing all the videos from years gone by.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can text him at (978) 413-2840 or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)