What is video editing?
So what is editing and what's it all about? Well, in the early days of film, you used to shoot film and then take it somewhere and cut it, physically cut it, and then tape it back together in the order that you wanted to tell the story. So maybe you shot a scene in the morning and a scene at night, and did it in reverse, you would just cut it and put those together so that the story flowed. Then we moved to the days of what's called non-linear editing--that's where video kind of stepped in. We had electronic recordings, but we had no way of really cutting it, because it was electronic--you couldn't cut a tape. So we would hook decks together, and then we would just record the parts of the information in the order that we wanted. We would literally push play on one deck, record on another, and then start recording the scenes in the order that we needed them to tell the story. Well, things have come so much further now, because we have digital editing, we have computer-based editing now, or what's called non-linear editing. Really, if I shoot on my digital camcorder, I can then bring everything to a computer, put them into what's called bins or file scenes, and then I just drag those scenes down to a timeline, or down to a little bar on my editing program, and put them in the order I need for the story to come across well. And at that point now I have the ability to do fades, to do wipes, everything that makes video come to life and tell that story inside a very simple system. And editing systems these days are PC based, they're Mac based, they go from thirty to forty dollars on up to very expensive systems, but they all do the same thing. They take information, and they put in an order which tells a story.
