OT? Editing Video

[mutefan]

The response-return on almost all video editing newsgroups is very low,
and I'm not sure my question isn't apropos to the two groups to which
I'm cross-posting this question.

I have a ThinkPad R40 with a Pentium M, 256 RAM, 20 Gig HD. For a
court case, I needed to be able to do some video editing of
too-revelatory domestic footage (not sexual!) rather than go to an
editor I've relied on in the past. I purchased a sale WD 80 Gig
external HD and a Hewlett Packard "Movie Writer" on the godforsaken
Overstock.com (please, friends, flee this site like the plague if you
value your wallet, sanity, and dignity as a consumer).

The Movie Writer offers two forms of DVD-burning: one a "wizard" my
laptop used once successfully, then froze on on subsequent tries. The
other is a software program named ShowBiz, which also offers a
DVD-burning wizard as well as a frame-by-frame editing option.

For the court case, I really need to learn how to use the
frame-by-frame program, quite like Windows Movie Maker, which came with
my laptop. Simply, I can understand the instructions neither of
ShowBiz nor Movie Maker when it comes to transferring the captured
video to the editing process.

By training, I'm an English instructor. I perhaps pay too much
attention to instructional nuance--phrases and vague terms ("chapter?"
What the heck's a "chapter?"). On the other hand, there's a
possibility that the tech writers who attempt to dumb-down the
instructions dumb them down in ways not helpful to the truly dumb among
aspiring video editors.

So if anyone can either walk me through or point me to a site where one
is literally walked through video-editing (for beginners), I would
appreciate it extremely.

(And please, please, please, do not buy from Overstock.com, not if you
1) want to get the actual item you ordered; 2) want to exchange
merchandise that (frequently) is overpriced junk leftover from some
third-world warehouse; or 3) get nervous by smiling happy young Utahans
who insist their e-contempt is business-sense. I am going to contact
the Attorney General's office in both my state and Utah regarding this
"company," which seems run by spoiled brats from their parents'
basements.)

 

[J. Clarke]

Before I say anything else, is this video attorney work product or is it
evidence? If it's evidence then you make _damn_ sure what you're doing is
acceptable before you mess with it if you want to keep your butt out of
jail.

That said, don't get hung up on the tools that come with your laptop and
your DVD drive. They're probably crap. If all you need is cut some
segments out and then burn to DVD then any number of programs will do that
for you--Nero 6.6 Ultra and Premiere Elements both come to mind--Premiere
Elements has a try before buy download but not sure what if anything is
disabled, Nero has a try before buy of the video editor on their site. Of
the two, Nero is far more limited as a video editor but what it does it
does fairly simply--find what you want to cut, click cut mode, click start,
play on, click end, and it's cut.

 

[mutefan]

Before I say anything else, is this video attorney work product or is it
evidence? If it's evidence then you make _damn_ sure what you're doing is
acceptable before you mess with it if you want to keep your butt out of
jail.

Thanks for being courageous enough to ask, John, and, yes, I'm aware
tampering with video for legal advantages is a no-no.

And thanks as well for the product suggestions, which I will peruse.

However, my problem is antecedent even to the steps you discuss; and
since you should probably be called St. John of the Comp.Sys. Usenet,
maybe you'll condescend to help me.

What I don't understand *may* be something so obvious that I'm
overlooking it. I.e., this afternoon I created a slideshow on Windows
Movie Maker, with "voice-over" narration of STILL--let me repeat
that--S-T-I-L-L--photographs I had scanned and imported into Movie
Maker. My cognitive weakness is that I don't understand how "movin'
pitchers" can be separated into the clips that my still photographs
OBVIOUSLY are to begin with.

Perhaps it's not so much a question of not comprehending how this can
be done but rather a matter of not understanding how a film--comprised
of so M-A-N-Y clips--can be edited in a single human lifetime if each
frame is considered a clip.

Another part of my problem is mechanical rather than cognitive. Once
video has been captured, how does Movie Maker--or any of the other
software programs you or I mentioned--"break" each frame into "clips?"
Either I haven't found the right command to break the moving picture
into parts, or else I'm underestimating the amount of work involved in
this.

Further, how does one get the captured video to move slowly enough so
that one can "stop" it when one wants to edit out significant portions?

If any (or none) of this makes sense, apologies for making you read so
far. In the event you or someone else can mind-meld with me on this
subject, man oh man would I be grateful.

 

[J. Clarke]

Thanks for being courageous enough to ask, John, and, yes, I'm aware
tampering with video for legal advantages is a no-no.

And thanks as well for the product suggestions, which I will peruse.

However, my problem is antecedent even to the steps you discuss; and
since you should probably be called St. John of the Comp.Sys. Usenet,
maybe you'll condescend to help me.

What I don't understand *may* be something so obvious that I'm
overlooking it. I.e., this afternoon I created a slideshow on Windows
Movie Maker, with "voice-over" narration of STILL--let me repeat
that--S-T-I-L-L--photographs I had scanned and imported into Movie
Maker. My cognitive weakness is that I don't understand how "movin'
pitchers" can be separated into the clips that my still photographs
OBVIOUSLY are to begin with.

Perhaps it's not so much a question of not comprehending how this can
be done but rather a matter of not understanding how a film--comprised
of so M-A-N-Y clips--can be edited in a single human lifetime if each
frame is considered a clip.

Another part of my problem is mechanical rather than cognitive. Once
video has been captured, how does Movie Maker--or any of the other
software programs you or I mentioned--"break" each frame into "clips?"
Either I haven't found the right command to break the moving picture
into parts, or else I'm underestimating the amount of work involved in
this.

Further, how does one get the captured video to move slowly enough so
that one can "stop" it when one wants to edit out significant portions?

If any (or none) of this makes sense, apologies for making you read so
far. In the event you or someone else can mind-meld with me on this
subject, man oh man would I be grateful.

Let's back up a little bit into history. As I'm sure you're aware, moving
pictures are just a bunch of stills played back at a high enough rate that
persistence of vision combines them into a simulacrum of movement.

Back when film was the only available technology, the way editing was
performed was to put a reel of film in a viewer, that in its simplest form
was just a magnifying glass with a light bulb behind the film, and crank
the film through until the point at which a segment was to begin was found.
The film would be cut there (with a knife or scissors or a purpose-made
cutter), and then that end would be hooked to an empty film reel, and then
the editor would continue cranking until he found the end, then cut there
and he'd have his "clip". Then he'd splice (or in other words fasten
together with glue or sticky tape) those "clips" into a finished film,
that, depending on the circumstances, might be used as is (for example in a
business presentation or newscast) or copied onto one or more continuous
rolls of film (for example if it was going to be distributed commercially
to movie houses).

Later video tape came into existence and it was handled pretty much the same
way except that the viewer was more complicated.

So the same model is now used for editing purely digital material, and the
editing programs that are available try as much as they can to imitate this
mechanical process.

I hadn't _looked_ at Windows Movie Maker before--it's actually not
terrible--not great, but for something included with Windows it's OK,
definitely usable for some purposes. I would advise _against_ using it for
any project that's going to end up a DVD though because there will be
several generations of quality loss if you do. I'm going to go through the
steps with Movie Maker though--once you can do what you need to with that
then you should be able to figure out the others fairly easily.

Now, on to the nitty-gritty. Somewhere you should have a file in a format
that Windows Movie Maker (which, being lazy, I'll call "WMM" from now on
unless I forget and use the full name) can read--.mpg for example but it
can handle a few others--if you can't get the file into one of those forms
then you may be forced to go to a different product.

When you bring a file into WMM (and I'm assuming you've got the most recent
one--if not then you might want to find it on the Microsoft site and
download it) it should appear in the upper center of the window as a
"clip". To do anything with it you have to drag it into one of the boxes
in the "storyboard" below. Having done that, though, you can't do much
with it until you click the button just above the storyboard that switches
to "show timeline". Once you've done that you'll, if you put the mouse
somewhere in the resulting timeline and click, see a vertical line with a
little box at the top appear in the timeline and you should in the preview
window see the scene appear, and change as you drag that line around. That
line is called the "playback indicator". To the left of the timeline you
should see several buttons, including one with a "+" sign and one with a
"-" sign--those zoom the timeline. Zoom it out all the way with the "-"
button, then start at the beginning and drag the playback indicator until
it crosses your first cut point. Then keep zooming in and repositioning
until you've got the playback indicator where you want to make the cut.
Once you've done that, on the "clip" menu at the top of the window, click
"split". Granularity appears to be about .07 seconds on this so you can
position the split to within about two frames.

Once you've made all the splits, then zoom out and one by one select the
pieces that you want to remove, and then delete them, then save the movie
(to local machine and I think the DV-AVI format would be the best bet among
those offered) and you're done with what WMM can do.

Once you've done that, to get to a DVD the DVD editing software is going to
have to re-render the AVI into the proper format for DVDs, which is going
to lose some image quality. You'd do better to start with Nero or Premier
Essentials or another purpose-made DVD-authoring program that doesn't do
any unnecessary format conversions. Unfortunately, most of the storage
formats for digital video involve "lossy" compression and so you lose a
little at every conversion.

In the case of WMM, starting with an off-the-air high-definition recording
(which is about as sharp as reasonably accessible video gets) the result by
the time it was burned to DVD was pretty fuzzy.

 

[mutefan]

Now, on to the nitty-gritty. [snip]

When you bring a file into WMM (and I'm assuming you've got the most recent
one--if not then you might want to find it on the Microsoft site and
download it) it should appear in the upper center of the window as a
"clip". To do anything with it you have to drag it into one of the boxes
in the "storyboard" below. Having done that, though, you can't do much
with it until you click the button just above the storyboard that switches
to "show timeline". Once you've done that you'll, if you put the mouse
somewhere in the resulting timeline and click, see a vertical line with a
little box at the top appear in the timeline and you should in the preview
window see the scene appear, and change as you drag that line around. That
line is called the "playback indicator". To the left of the timeline you
should see several buttons, including one with a "+" sign and one with a
"-" sign--those zoom the timeline. Zoom it out all the way with the "-"
button, then start at the beginning and drag the playback indicator until
it crosses your first cut point. Then keep zooming in and repositioning
until you've got the playback indicator where you want to make the cut.
Once you've done that, on the "clip" menu at the top of the window, click
"split". Granularity appears to be about .07 seconds on this so you can
position the split to within about two frames.

Once you've made all the splits, then zoom out and one by one select the
pieces that you want to remove, and then delete them, then save the movie
(to local machine and I think the DV-AVI format would be the best bet among
those offered) and you're done with what WMM can do.

They don't call you J.C. for nothin'!!! Thank you--mille fois merci.
You cured my deaf and dumbness, and I am NOT being sacreligious by
saying this. The A-HA! moment was your defining the ENTIRETY of the
..wmm file as *A* clip. Notice that I use the indefinite article "a" to
describe what should be called "the" (definite article) clip.

The definite article would have cleared things up immediately for me
because I understood a clip to be exactly as you described in your
prologue about old-time movie making: a single frame of film. For
Movie Maker to regard the entirety of a file as "a" clip--this is just
so (as the kids say) cold. But following your instructions, I am
absolutely certain I'll be able to manipulate the imported or captured
video footage, because I've already fooled around with the storyboard
and timeline areas in making my slideshow with voice-overs.

I honestly wish you were the John Clarke from Bingington (!) so I could
drive up and buy you a box of half-price Valentine chocolates I'll
let you know what happens, and how my attorney reacts when he sees MY,
not our editor's, work.

 

[J. Clarke]

Now, on to the nitty-gritty. [snip]

When you bring a file into WMM (and I'm assuming you've got the most recent
one--if not then you might want to find it on the Microsoft site and
download it) it should appear in the upper center of the window as a
"clip". To do anything with it you have to drag it into one of the boxes
in the "storyboard" below. Having done that, though, you can't do much
with it until you click the button just above the storyboard that switches
to "show timeline". Once you've done that you'll, if you put the mouse
somewhere in the resulting timeline and click, see a vertical line with a
little box at the top appear in the timeline and you should in the preview
window see the scene appear, and change as you drag that line around. That
line is called the "playback indicator". To the left of the timeline you
should see several buttons, including one with a "+" sign and one with a
"-" sign--those zoom the timeline. Zoom it out all the way with the "-"
button, then start at the beginning and drag the playback indicator until
it crosses your first cut point. Then keep zooming in and repositioning
until you've got the playback indicator where you want to make the cut.
Once you've done that, on the "clip" menu at the top of the window, click
"split". Granularity appears to be about .07 seconds on this so you can
position the split to within about two frames.

Once you've made all the splits, then zoom out and one by one select the
pieces that you want to remove, and then delete them, then save the movie
(to local machine and I think the DV-AVI format would be the best bet among
those offered) and you're done with what WMM can do.

They don't call you J.C. for nothin'!!! Thank you--mille fois merci.
You cured my deaf and dumbness, and I am NOT being sacreligious by
saying this. The A-HA! moment was your defining the ENTIRETY of the
.wmm file as *A* clip. Notice that I use the indefinite article "a" to
describe what should be called "the" (definite article) clip.

The definite article would have cleared things up immediately for me
because I understood a clip to be exactly as you described in your
prologue about old-time movie making: a single frame of film. For
Movie Maker to regard the entirety of a file as "a" clip--this is just
so (as the kids say) cold. But following your instructions, I am
absolutely certain I'll be able to manipulate the imported or captured
video footage, because I've already fooled around with the storyboard
and timeline areas in making my slideshow with voice-overs.

I honestly wish you were the John Clarke from Bingington (!) so I could
drive up and buy you a box of half-price Valentine chocolates I'll
let you know what happens, and how my attorney reacts when he sees MY,
not our editor's, work.

Glad to be of assistance, and I hope your efforts are appreciated by the
attorney.