What equipment do I need for video editing?
You need some sort of playback device. A lot of us use our camcorder, but you could also buy a deck as well to play back the appropriate tapes or whatever format you recorded it in. Then you'll need some equipment to get it from that deck or that playback device into a computer. That's typically known as firewire cable, also known as IEEE1394, and sometimes even called an iLink depending on which manufacturer is labelling it. That's then going to go into a computer system, either a Mac or a PC, through the appropriate connection, like a firewire card or an IEEE card. It will then be stored on the computer's hard drive as raw files. That's when you start editing and using your editing equipment. The files are then going to go into bins on your editing platform no matter which one you're using, and you're going to then start trimming those bins, and putting them in the order that best tells the story. You're going to take a clip that was five minutes and you need two minutes of it so you're going to trim it down. Then you're going to put it on a timeline in the right order so the story is told. Once the whole edit is done, you've got your titles put in and you've got whatever effects put in, you're going to have to them put that on to something. A lot of us will just put that back to the original format. Maybe record it back to the deck. But, if we have a DVD burner we might want to burn it to DVD. If we want to deliver it in hi-def, all of that kind of stays the same, except now you need to store it as a high definition file. The Windows Media players of today in PCs will play it. iMovie HD or Final Cut HD on the Mac side will play it. You'll just record it to a DVD as a high definition file. Now, you need to determine how much information you can put on there. It's all done by the computer - might be one disc, might be two discs, but there's always a way to store it. So you're looking to go to a disk, or you're going to go back to tape probably. That is all the equipment needed for video editing.
