Tech Guide

Director's cut

Jan Ozer ZDNet US

Published: 10 Jan 2003

Now that you have your camera and some footage, you'll need to prepare your PC for its role as a video editing platform. To get the video onto your computer, you'll need a FireWire port or card and video-editing software. If you're using a Mac with a FireWire port, Apple iMovie will more than suffice for simple editing and output. Unfortunately, Microsoft's Movie Maker, bundled with Windows XP, is much more anaemic, so you're better off looking elsewhere.

Put it on your card

Although you can purchase your FireWire card and editing software separately, many low-priced video-editing or authoring packages, such as Pinnacle Studio DV, include FireWire cards. Interestingly, all FireWire cards, whether they cost £15 or £150, copy files from camera to computer at exactly the same speed.

Many entry-level video editing packages, like Pinnacle's Studio DV, include a low-end FireWire card.

A card bundled with a £99 program such as Studio DV will simply transfer video to your computer for editing. More expensive cards offer real-time previewing, which means that you can see your editing changes (transitions, titles, and special effects) without having to first render the changes. That makes for much faster editing. But these higher-end cards ship with only Adobe's Premiere, which is way too advanced for newcomers to digital video.

The software story

Most beginners are better off with programs such as Ulead's VideoStudio, Roxio's VideoWave, or Pinnacle's Studio DV, which offer most of the same basic features in a much easier-to-use interface.

Basic video-editing software lets you use transitions such as dissolves and wipes, smoothing the flow among multiple sequences. You also can add titles, brighten or darken under- or overexposed video, and insert still images (a company logo, for instance) over your sequences. Many programs let you push the creative envelope with special effects that convert your videos to black-and-white or sepia, or that introduce simulated film noise, making your videos look like productions from the '30s and '40s.

These basic video editors make it simple to add a narration track, rip a CD-ROM for background audio, or even create a custom background music track. By contrast, higher-end programs, including Adobe's Premiere and Pinnacle's Edition DV, offer greater configurability and more complicated effects, such as video overlay, image panning or three-dimensional motion controls.

High-end video editors like Adobe's Premiere and Pinnacle's Edition DV provide configurability and a range of complex special effects.

Conversely, we're starting to see features on consumer-oriented editors that may never appear in Premiere. Roxio's VideoWave Movie Creator, for example, can apply a template to your individual clips. You then might select the 10 best shots from your child's last birthday party, pick the Birthday Party template, and let VideoWave choose introductory animation, background audio, festive transitions and special effects.

My author, my editor

More and more consumer video editors now include DVD-authoring capabilities. Briefly, DVD authoring is the process of building interactive menus that link to your videos, then burning the videos themselves to DVD. Of course, you'll need a DVD writer, such as Sony's DRU500A to actually produce the DVD, which should play in most computer and set-top DVD players.

For years, DVD authoring and video editing were separate processes. You would create your video files and export them into the required MPEG-2 format in your video editor. Then, you'd import the files into an authoring program, build the menus and burn the disc. But the lines between these tasks are beginning to blur now.

For example, VideoWave and VideoStudio currently offer DVD authoring as a separate step after you finish your video projects. Even better, Pinnacle Studio 8.0 creates DVD menus during the video-editing process for more integrated, intuitive operation.

Pinnacle's Studio 8.0 creates DVD menus during the video-editing process.

Of course, you can still buy standalone DVD-authoring programs that simply compress and prepare video for DVD burning, with little or no editing. Pinnacle Express DV, for example, lets you capture DV footage to disc, select scenes and create simple, sequential menus for viewing them. For a step up, Sonic Solutions' MyDVD offers easy conversion of DV to DVD but includes more menu-production capabilities.

If you have a CD-R/RW drive, most of these programs can create VideoCD or SuperVideoCD titles that, at least in theory, should play on many DVD drives and players. Unfortunately, inconsistent support for these standards makes compatibility hit-and-miss. With DVD-R drives floating below the £150 price range, DVD is the increasingly preferred option. Of course, you can do much more than burn video to CD-R and DVD-R. Read on for different ways to share your video.