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11.1: Introduction

  • Page ID
    306546
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    Now that you’ve captured great video on your camera (or cell phone), it’s time to prepare it for others to see. While many of the digital skills you will learn in this book are “platform agnostic” — meaning they look the same no matter what type of computer you are using — editing video will be different for those using Mac computers versus those using a Windows machine.

    We will detail the basic editing process mostly using iMovie for the Mac and Windows Movie Maker for the PC. Why? Because both are free, and one is probably already installed on your machine. And both are easy to use and accomplish the basic tasks you need.

    The magic of digital video is the simplicity with which you can rearrange the order of your clips. It’s unlikely you’ll want to create a video story that plays the footage in the exact same order that you filmed it, so editing and arranging the clips will allow you to present the story just the way you want.

    In addition to deciding on the sequence of your clips, you’ll need to decide whether you want to add such things as music or narration to tell your story.

    Good audio will make all the difference to your video, but you’re not relegated only to the audio that is on the videotape. iMovie and Movie Maker make it easy to import music files or voice-overs and place them exactly where they’ll have the most impact on your video.

    Voice-overs can be especially helpful for video footage with lots of noise. Think of a high school basketball game where a game-winning shot sends the crowd into a frenzy. A voice-over can explain who made the shot and tell you the final score. The frenzied crowd can still be heard, but the level has been lowered so as not to interfere with the narrated information.

    Voice-overs can be especially helpful for video footage with lots of noise.

    Both iMovie and Movie Maker will also give you various options for transitions, which allow you to control how one clip evolves into another. Without transitions (such as fading into/out of a shot), each clip will have a hard cut and that is fine, and even desirable, for news stories on video. Avoid overly fancy transitions, which can make your story look amateurish and silly. Leave those features for the home movies.

    You may also want to add titles so you can identify speakers in your video or publish credits at the end of the clip. You can use the Titles feature for this but resist the urge to import a title into the beginning of your video. That’s also a little too “home movie” for news.

    Remember, earlier we discussed the option of shooting a still photo with your digital camera so that you would have a thumbnail image that could be used to promote your story. With both iMovie and Movie Maker, you can capture a “screenshot” or a mug that can be used in print to tease to the online video package or on the Web site as a promotional icon.

    Note

    With all computer production, it is important to save often so you don’t lose your hard work should you make a mistake.

    Once you’ve produced your video package you’ll be ready to put it online, but first it must be compressed. Talk to your Web staff, if you have one, about their preferred format for video on the Web site. They may have a system in place to process video and serve it in Flash, which allows for greater quality and smaller file sizes. If that’s the case, you can export your file with a much larger file size.

    You’ll likely also need someone from the Web site to actually publish the video on the site with File Transfer Protocol or they will give you the directions to do it yourself. (See Chapter 2.)


    This page titled 11.1: Introduction is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mark Briggs via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.