Editing Your Home Video Footage

Much of the footage fed into your computer or even copied directly to your standalone DVD recorder will be in a raw, unedited form and it could be that you want to perform a simple tidying up job as you commit your analog assets to a digital future. It's a fact that the majority of home camcorder owners would like to undertake a degree of simple video editing merely to cut out the unwanted bits such as false starts, accidental recordings and out of focus or defective footage. The good news is that this can be achieved with most modern computers and without any sophisticated applications or technology.

This is an obvious first step on the road to creating perfect digital copies of your home movie footage once it's in the digital environment. The important thing to remember is that as you cut, copy, and paste clips in your chosen computer editing program you won't incur any quality loss. Having converted analog recordings to the sequences of highly complex binary numbers they now are, everything you do to your recordings will leave them in the same condition as they were when they first went digital. In digital form, it's easy to trim, cut, and copy clips and add them to others without fear of losing quality in exactly the same way that you can scan a photograph and manipulate it.

All home cine and video footage has parts that could do with chopping out and tidying up. It could be that the cine film came to a roll end at that point, or there might have been a slight problem with the film itself such as over exposure or light flare. Footage taken with earlier analog camcorders might suffer from awkward "clunky" edit points where the VHS, Video8, or Betamax tape was stopped and started. These things would be very difficult to sort out in their original formats, but thanks to the digital video editing packages now available, it's very easy indeed.

Even the basic video editing application that came on a disk with your camcorder will allow you to trim the beginnings and ends of clips in addition to enabling you to move them around on the timeline. Some applications, Microsoft Movie Maker and Apple iMovie being just two, give you the power to grab the "head" or "tail" of a clip and make the clip shorter or longer. The alternative, of course, is to literally chop off what you think you don't need, although you'll have to reload the clip into the timeline if you change your mind. Having decided on the preferred length of a number of clips on the timeline, you might also decide that clip 4 should be where clip 2 is, that's easy to do and it's a feature of every single editing program out there.

Whether your movie footage has been acquired from old analog video sources or by transferring cine film to video, the process of editing and reconstructing your footage is identical, regardless of the computer software being used. What's more, it's where you start to take control of your footage in a manner that's intended to entertain and enthrall your audience. In the main, of course, the primary reason for digitizing your movie assets is to apply a level of future-proofing to them; there will be a time in the not too distant future when you won't have ready access to a VHS, Betamax, or Video8 tape player, let alone an 8mm or 16mm film projector, so archive them now while you have the chance.

It's at the digital editing stage that you find you suddenly have a marvelous opportunity to shape your raw material into a form that suits you, perhaps for the first time. Suddenly for very little financial outlay you're able to not only cut out all the bits you don't want, but you can actively and creatively make a movie that you can be proud of.

Having selected clips one by one and trimmed them down to exclude all the embarrassing bits and segments that hadn't intended to be recorded; you're now in an ideal position to really build a new piece of work.

With every shot you're telling a story that, in turn, builds into a sequence that carries depth and meaning for the viewer. If that sounds a bit high-brow, consider your view of many other home movies you've seen, do they engage you or do they bore you after a few minutes? Although you're not always aware of it, almost everything you see on TV and in the cinema is edited with the object of carrying you along in a particular direction. Every shot in every sequence counts. And so it should be with your projects even a simple re-edit of the contents of a load of 8mm cine-film canisters can be honed into shape. You may have lots of footage of the kids on the beach or granny taking the dog for a walk but do you want every second of every shot? In fact, do you need every shot? Unless you have very particular reasons for keeping it, make every shot justify its existence and, if it serves no useful purpose, cut it out!

When piecing together clips of footage, however old and scratchy they are, consider assembling them in a sequence that conveys a sense of continuity. So, if you have several rolls of footage taken on a particular vacation, make sure that you not only copy them in a chronological order, but that you also edit them in such a way that the viewer can gain a sense of time and place. If they're compiled out of sequence they won't mean much to anyone other than you and in years to come that might cause a confusing problem for future generations!So, if your week long vacation involves a car journey, a ferry crossing and a stay in a country cottage by the sea, make sure that the order in which they're transferred and edited reflects this. That's what's meant by the term "continuity". Get it wrong and your audience will become disorientated.