Basic Video Editing

The raw footage, you shoot with your camera, will seldom be more than just that - raw footage. If you want to appeal to a wider audience than just yourself and your nearest family, some basic editing is required.

Clipping

Most raw footage will contain minute long shots of which you might only want to use a few seconds in your movie - or you might want to "merge" clips from different parts of the footage.

Transitions

The simplest possible movie is a sequence of clips strung together on a timeline. Provided the clipping has been done well, you might have a reasonable movie just by clipping and stitching clips together in a timely sequence.

However, often things can be improved quite a lot by adding a transition here and there. For example, you might want to use a dissolve, or a wipe or a fade.

Menu and chapters

Let's say you are making a long movie from your world tour. You and your audience might enjoy watching the whole movie from start to end a few times, but there'll come occasions where you want to just skip the parts from Turkey and India and jump straight to China.

Rather than having to press 'Fast Forward' all the way from Greece to China, you can turn each country into a chapter. This makes it possible to make a menu that lets you jump directly to the first frame from the chosen country.

Sound track

You might want to supplement or replace the sound track recorded by your camcorder. Adding background music can lend atmosphere and create certain feelings. You might want to add narration at various parts of the movie.

Besides, in many cases, the recorded sound is unusable or poor. For example, you have zoomed in on a roaring lion 100 meters away. The wind carried the sound in the opposite direction so you don't have much of a roar on the sound track. In that case, you might want to substitute a better roar for the one you have.

In case you are contemplating to have some digital video editing done (somewhere) the first step is to contact us. At this point, it doesn't matter how clear you are regarding how you want your video edited. Our first timers range from home video amateurs, with only a vague idea that they would like to impress friends by showing more professional looking party movies, to persons and companies that state exactly what they want in technical terms. We are very flexible and we just take it from where you are at.