Watch Your Home Movies: Editing Your Video Footage Into A Film

One of the most important things I do in my job is editing. When people first think about sharing their life story, they are overwhelmed with the volumes of information to relate and recount. It's my job to help them focus, to record and produce a clear, concise and entertaining story.

One of the hardest things to do is edit your own family footage. In your eyes, everything that was filmed feels like it has great significance and meaning. But a larger audience may not feel the same way. This is why you MUST edit down your footage if you plan for others to sit and watch it for any great length of time. You must get to the heart of the story and eliminate all non-essential details.

While there is great skill involved in editing together an amazing film, for the average person, you need not have great skills to make something that's entertaining and watchable. Think of editing film as similar to editing a term paper using your computer's word processing program. You have lots of ideas. You just need to cut out the ones that don't add to your thesis and move the ones that do until they make sense and flow together.

And just like you need to find the right word processing software to edit your term paper, you will need to find the right film editing software that works best with your computer and your skill level.

There are many types of editing software out there for Mac and PC at varying price points. This article shares the top 5 software out there for novices and advanced alike. It's a great summary of the best that's out there and I strongly agree with their recommendations. http://lifehacker.com/5165944/six-best-video-editing-applications

Once you've chosen your software, the first step with editing your film is to CAPTURE all of the footage you shot and get it into your computer.

• If you filmed onto a removable drive, you can hook this up to your computer and find all the clips you shot ready for editing immediately.

• If you filmed onto digital tape, you will need to "digitize" your footage by hooking up your camera to your computer via USB or Firewire and then use editing software to convert the footage into files that can be read by the software.

• If you filmed onto a DVD, you will need to use software that breaks down the DVD into clips that can be used with the editing software. (I like MPEG Streamclip, for Mac or PC. It works well and it's free! http://www.squared5.com/ )

After you've captured your footage, you want to organize it into clips and bins that go with a theme or story, depending on how you decide to organize.

Once you've organized your clips, you will place them onto your software's timeline and start re-arranging them to create your story. Here is where you'll want to cut out all of those extra parts that aren't needed, such as the speakers' many "umms" and "ahhs," or the footage where you forgot to turn off the record button while you were setting up, or the footage from last year's Halloween party that was on the tape but isn't relevant to the story you are editing together about the family reunion. (You get my point.)

What will ultimately "connect the dots" and make your story flow is by using Cutaway Shots. A simple example is using photos or other non-interview footage to cover over the cut points from an interview. (When you edit down someone's interview and chop it into smaller pieces, it will end up being a series of "jump cuts." Cutaway or B-Roll shots cover these jump cuts.) The best cutaways are ones that are relevant to the story and enhance its meaning.

However you manage to edit down your footage, the key is to make it something that's shorter and even more meaningful than the original footage you shot. Your audience will thank you more than you will ever know!

DMB Pictures is a boutique video production company specializing in producing broadcast-quality personal stories for families, non-profits and small businesses. The company opened its doors in January 2006 led by Debbie Mintz Brodsky, a three-time Emmy Award-winning television producer with more than 20 years of experience.

Visit us at http://www.dmbpictures.com/


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