Good Editing for Digital Video

Shooting good video is just part of making a good video. Editing brings out the best of what you shot and helps to create a more watchable and entertaining experience for your audience.

The Cutting Room Floor - Don't Be Afraid of It

Editing can sometimes be painful. How can you even think of cutting any part of little Timmy's nap footage?! It almost seems wrong. Well, it's not. Trust us.

Most of those comically boring home movies suffer from the same mistake: too much footage of the same thing. If you've already got a full minute of little Timmy snoring away with his teddy bear, cut the next four minutes if it's just more of the same. Friends and family will be grateful you did.

REMEMBER: A minute of screen time seems much longer than a minute of real life.

Only keep the highlights. Have an hour of the Christmas morning gift exchange? Trim it to 10 minutes by keeping only the opening of the big or important gifts and the funny or interesting moments. Cut everything else. Do you really need to see every present being opened and every card being read?

The fact is, a DVD filled with several 5-10 minute scenes is better than a DVD of two 30-minute scenes. You should have one DVD labeled "Baby's First Year" and not 10 DVDs covering the same timeframe.

Making One Camera Seem Like a Bunch

Television shows and movies cut constantly to different angles, close-ups and wides of the same event. They look like they were shot using multiple cameras and they often were. TV shows almost always use multiple cameras and movies shoot the same scenes over and over again from different angles and edit those angles together later. You can take the movie approach.

Move around with your digital camcorder to get different angles. Zoom in or get closer for tighter shots. You can then edit things together for a multi-camera effect.

For example: Shoot mom frosting the cake in a wide shot then walk up and get a close up of the cake being frosted. In editing, you can cut out the part where you walk up or zoom in so the result is a wide shot that cuts to a close up.

The end product is a much more entertaining and watchable video.

Transitions

Transitions are the effects applied between scenes to give an artistic link from one to the other. You've likely seen the end of one scene in a movie fade into the next scene or a "wipe" that brings the next scene sliding in from the left or right to replace the scene before it.

Transitions are nice touches and can give your video a professional and polished look. However, they should be used sparingly and subtly.

Stick with simple fades and tasteful dissolves as much as possible. Star wipes, page peels and other over-the-top transitions might look tempting and cool but scream amateur video and will elicit a lot of eye rolling from your audience.

Music

Yes! Add music where you can. If it's appropriate for what's on screen, music can really bring scenes to life. It can inject emotion and energy into your work and further engage your audience. Just make sure the music is at such a level that any important audio can be clearly heard and that you add music in only where needed.