Video Editing

This is a very involved topic as there is analog editing and digital editing. I don't have any experience with the analog equipment so I won't touch that subject except to say that analog video editing cards are very expensive, at least twice that of a good firewire digital pci card.

If you have bought a digital camcorder recently then you will want to eventually buy a digital video editing package consisting of a firewire pci card that plugs into your computer and some video editing software to run it all.

I've only tried two different digital camcorders, namely the Canon ZR-10 and the Canon Elura2. Both are easy to use. The only differences being the price of course (ZR-10 ~ $1300 CN, Elura2 ~ $1600 CN) and a couple features. The Elura model is about 2/3 the physical size of the ZR-10. They both use standard DV tapes which are $10 a piece for 1 hr of video. The Elura2 has all the features of the ZR-10 plus a progressive scan mode for action shots and the still frame photo mode seems to have slightly higher resolution. In some ways the ZR-10 is actually easier to use. I suppose you get used to it but the Elura2 is so small that pushing the pause/record button moves the camera enough to shake the video picture.

The video editing package I use is made by Pyro Digital Video, specific model 1394DV which includes an ADS Technologies 3 port firewire pci card, Ulead Videostudio and a light version of Ulead Mediastudio Pro 6.0 VE which is the latest version. It only lacks a couple of features of it's full-version $500 cousin. All this for less than $140 bucks! The card comes with one 1394 firewire cable for your camera.

My hardware recommendations:

You'll need at least an Intel Celeron 300A processor, 128mb of ram is nice too, and at least a 5400rpm high capacity IDE harddrive. You must have your harddrive formatted with at minimum FAT32. FAT16 does not allow a large enough filesize for effective video editing. You also need an available PCI slot in your computer and an available IRQ.

A 20 minute high resolution video will consume approximately 4GB worth of data. This is HUGE. To edit 20 minutes of video you will first have to transfer segments of raw video to your harddrive. This will be more than 4GB worth. While MediaStudio is working on your file it will consume up to another 1/2GB. Once your finished video is edited you need to create a finished AVI format video file. This takes another 4GB. You then switch to a new DV tape and transfer your new edited finished video from your harddrive to the camera. That all happens in "real-time". So, in other words, you need around 9GB or more for editing 20 minutes of DV video.

If you would like more information on either VideoStudio or MediaStudio Pro check out the Ulead website here.

Most firewire based camcorders can be fully controlled by the video editing software such as the Video Capture module of MediaStudio Pro. You can simply make a batch file which lists the "In" and "Out" capture time. The capture module will rewind the camcorder, play, start recording to the computer automatically according to your settings.

You have to realize that it does take some considerable time to create finished video. Especially if you have a lot of scene transitions (wipe effects).

The finished video can be saved in many formats including AVI, MPEG, etc. You can make video for your website as well in a small compressed mpeg format. The options are endless. For instance I converted 1 hr of VHS video, transferred it to the camcorder, put it into the computer and saved it as 3 compressed mpeg files and saved it to a CDR for use in any computer's cd-rom drive. Impressive... 1 hr of close to VHS quality video on a standard $2 cd-rom disk.

I prefer MediaStudio Pro over VideoStudio because it has many many features. Things you just can't do with VideoStudio. Lots of editing options. It looks complicated at first and it may take you one or two videos to figure things out but once you do it becomes quite easy to slap together video with impressive scene transitions and text effects or added sound tracks.

One small note of disappointment... for those that have never experience DV video I must tell you that the video quality is only marginally better than the analog Hi8 format. One has to remember that these are still only "consumer" products. The ease of doing your own video editing makes it worthwhile though.

Have fun with your next video editing project!