EDITING YOUR VIDEOS
Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 6:45 am
EDITING YOUR VIDEOS
Have you ever wanted a kill scene to be longer? Do you have videos with distracting elements in scenes you wish weren't there? Do you own videos in which the continuity doesn't make any sense? Well, you can have it your way by becoming a video editor with a free program like Windows Movie Maker.
Is video editing difficult? Does it require special skills? The answer to both questions is no. If you know how to drag and drop you can edit videos, and have a lot of fun in the process.
Windows Movie Maker comes with most versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7. So chances are it's already on your programs list. If not it's available as a free download from Microsoft. Much as I hate praising Microsoft, this program works well, is easy to use and has all the features and functions an amateur editor is likely to want. These include audio track editing and special effects like scene dissolves, subtitling and title card making. There are built-in tutorials which make it easy to get started. The accepted video formats are WMV, AVI and DIVX. (The finished edits are WMVs regardless of the inputted format type.)
HOW IT WORKS: When you copy a video onto the Windows Movie Maker, it automatically splits it into dozens of small clips. Drag and drop the clips you want onto the timeline in whichever order you want. Once there they can be manually split and trimmed if needed. FX like dissolves are added by dragging and dropping them onto the timeline. There are refinements you will learn along the way, but as far as the basic editing process goes, that's all there is to it.
As and example, I extracted the money shots in a whacko vacuum strangling scene from the Japanese super heroine flick, "White Eye Hell." (caps attached) These were only 39 seconds long, but by repeating and recombining them, and adding in brief unrelated clips from other parts of the original video, I was able to come up with a more or less convincing 7 minute scene. (This was a rush job, so some of the split matches aren't perfect.) Again using Windows Movie Maker, I reduced the 105MB file to 33MB for faster downloading. The slight reduction in image quality this caused is all-but unnoticeable.
The finished edit is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?7tihgu4al65ogrj
IMPORTANT NOTE: All the bits and pieces used from the original video only totaled 58 seconds in length. This is less than 1% of the original's runtime. Therefore posting this edit is not a copyright violation.
Al
Have you ever wanted a kill scene to be longer? Do you have videos with distracting elements in scenes you wish weren't there? Do you own videos in which the continuity doesn't make any sense? Well, you can have it your way by becoming a video editor with a free program like Windows Movie Maker.
Is video editing difficult? Does it require special skills? The answer to both questions is no. If you know how to drag and drop you can edit videos, and have a lot of fun in the process.
Windows Movie Maker comes with most versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7. So chances are it's already on your programs list. If not it's available as a free download from Microsoft. Much as I hate praising Microsoft, this program works well, is easy to use and has all the features and functions an amateur editor is likely to want. These include audio track editing and special effects like scene dissolves, subtitling and title card making. There are built-in tutorials which make it easy to get started. The accepted video formats are WMV, AVI and DIVX. (The finished edits are WMVs regardless of the inputted format type.)
HOW IT WORKS: When you copy a video onto the Windows Movie Maker, it automatically splits it into dozens of small clips. Drag and drop the clips you want onto the timeline in whichever order you want. Once there they can be manually split and trimmed if needed. FX like dissolves are added by dragging and dropping them onto the timeline. There are refinements you will learn along the way, but as far as the basic editing process goes, that's all there is to it.
As and example, I extracted the money shots in a whacko vacuum strangling scene from the Japanese super heroine flick, "White Eye Hell." (caps attached) These were only 39 seconds long, but by repeating and recombining them, and adding in brief unrelated clips from other parts of the original video, I was able to come up with a more or less convincing 7 minute scene. (This was a rush job, so some of the split matches aren't perfect.) Again using Windows Movie Maker, I reduced the 105MB file to 33MB for faster downloading. The slight reduction in image quality this caused is all-but unnoticeable.
The finished edit is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?7tihgu4al65ogrj
IMPORTANT NOTE: All the bits and pieces used from the original video only totaled 58 seconds in length. This is less than 1% of the original's runtime. Therefore posting this edit is not a copyright violation.
Al