Beginners guide to PC video editing

By: Scott Brown

If you're new to PC video editing then knowing where to start
can be a bit daunting, so hopefully this guide will point you in
the right direction.

To start with you will need a few items of equipment

Camcorders/Video Decks

Depending on your requirements or aims there are number of
different solutions to discuss, so i will split these up into
separate sections.

1.If you are starting from new then i recommend buying a new
digital camcorder, this will give you superior video and sound
quality as well as making getting started in video editing very
simple, so ideal for the beginner. There are thousands to choose
from catering for various types of budgets.

2. You may already have an old video deck or camcorder which
uses the old analogue outputs such as composite or s-video (be
sure to check first what outputs you have). For this kind of
setup you would need a capture card/analogue to digital
converter, this is discussed in more detail further on in the
article.

A PC for Video Editing

It is now possible to easily capture footage from your Digital
Camcorder directly to your PC and edit it. If you looking at
buying a new PC or building a new one then the currents spec's
are more then powerful enough ,a typical spec PC these days is a
P4, 512Mb Ram, 80Gb HDD, Windows XP or something along those
lines. You could always use your existing PC if you have one,
but i wouldn't recommend using anything below a PIII 600.

Additional Hardware

When transferring video from your camcorder to your PC there are
a number of additional things to consider depending on the type
of camcorder your using. If you're using a digital camcorder
then all your need is a firewire card (also known as an IEE1394
card), a lot of current PC's have these as standard now,
otherwise you will need to purchase the card separately. Some of
these will come bundled with editing software such as Adobe
Premiere but this really depends on which card you buy and how
much you spend, once your camcorder is connected to your
firewire port windows will automatically recognise your Digital
Camcorder. If your using the old analogue camcorder then you
will also need an analogue to digital converter, see the section
on video editing cards below.

Speed?

Its worth considering your Pc's Processor speed, the speed will
effect the rate your video will encode, encoding is where your
DV video clips are converted into a more compressed format, for
example DVD's are encoded to MPEG2. So the faster the better
really. Also consider the amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb would
be the minimum.

Extra Hard Drive Storage

Its worth considering having an extra dedicated drive for your
video footage, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GB
of hard drive space so consider a large capacity hard drive such
as an 80Gb or 120Gb, also consider the disk drive RPM, at least
7200RPM would be recommended. If your PC supports it (most new
ones do now), then a Serial ATA (SATA) drive will offer
increased date transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec compared to 100
or 133 offered by the IDE drives, you may also consider a SCSI
drive if you're PC has an SCSI adapter as standard.

DVD/CD Burners

If your planning on putting your film onto CD-ROM (VCD), or DVD
then a CDRW or DVDRW is an essential piece of kit, most new pc's
may have a CDRW or DVDRW as standard, to burn your DVD, you'll
need DVD authoring software. Video Editing Cards If you have and
older analogue video camera/deck then an analogue USB or PCI
capture cards will suffice. These dedicated analogue to digital
converters take process of conversion away from the CPU and
therefore speeds up transfer. If worth getting a quality capture
card as the cheaper cards can produce mixed results,

The Video Editing Software

This is where all your creative work starts and the creative
work starts, you can capture video from your camera, edit the
captured clips, arrange them into a sequence, add transitions,
credits and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready export your
movie back to the camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD,
VCD etc).



About the author:
Founder of http://wwww.avmechanic.co.uk a Free Video Editing and
Computer help community covering a wide range of topics.