Here’s how to edit a video easily using completely free software.
We’re going back to the basics.
First up let’s make a folder for the project, mine’s called ‘River’ and you’ll see
why in a second.
Now we’ve already filmed, so we can take this card from the camera and this USB card
reader, and connect them up.
So we’re gonna find the video clips, select them all and copy them into our project folder.
Once that’s done, we may as well take out the SD card.
Now since we’re going for simple and free software, i’m gonna find Windows Movie Maker
it is free, you just might have to download it.
And if you’re using a Mac, you can use iMovie which is basically very similar - either way
before we can start editing, we need to import the footage, which basically means dragging
it and dropping it into the software.
And now we wait, this part can take a while.
When is has finished processing, we now have all of our footage laid out one after another
in the timeline, and we can start editing.
Watching the first clip, it’s hardly surprising there’s a bit at the beginning that we don't
really need to see, so let's find where we actually want it to start, and click “set
start point”.
Now it’s hidden that first bit, and we can watch it through until we feel like we’ve
seen enough, and then we click “set end point” and it will move on to the next shot.
And really, that is what most of editing is: deciding when to come in, and when to move
on.
No matter how expensive the software is, we’ll spend plenty of time working out how long
each shot should last.
But for a video as simple as this, the general idea is to just remove the boring parts.
If the whole clip is useless, we can right click and remove it, or just hit the delete
key.
But what it we like the start and the end of the clip, but we want to remove the middle?
For that we can use the split tool to separate it into three separate clips, and then just
delete the second one so it skips out that middle section entirely.
By the time we've removed everything we don't want, the video is almost always much shorter
than what we started with, and that's totally normal.
Once we’ve cut down each shot, we should then watch the whole thing through, to see
if any parts feel too slow, or if we’ve removed too much and it’s not actually making
any sense anymore.
Of course the other big part of editing is the order, we can try clicking and dragging
a clip to put it earlier or later in the video, and that can get us thinking about what we
want to show people first, and what we can save for a strong and memorable ending.
If we feel the need to add some text, then we can click home, then add a caption, and
from here it’s just like using a textbox in any other software, change the font, change
the size, movie it around.
The title will also show up on the timeline so we can move it around or change the duration
just like the video clips.
Now sound is very easy to forget about, but that would a big mistake.
So with simple software like this, I’d just recommend going and finding a song or a movie
trailer on YouTube, and use that to adjust the volume of your speakers until they sound
about right.
Now when we go back to our project, we might notice that it’s too quiet, or that it’s
much louder than the music, and we can change the volume of each clip individually.
If we want to use some background music, then we can go to ‘add music’, and find some
that we’ve made or downloaded earlier.
After that, it’s the same old same story: we choose when we want the music to come in,
when we want it to stop, and adjust the volume if needed.
So we’ve covered the essentials, but then we see the “Visual Effects” panel, that’s
sounds pretty fancy right, that sounds pretty hollywood...
But no, they’re mostly just cheesy filters that most professionals would stay well away from.
So there we go, once we’re happy with the duration and the order of each shot, and we’ve
included any sound, music or titles that we needed, we can then export or save the video,
putting it into our project folder with the rest of the files.
As soon as that’s done, we’ll be able to put our edited video straight on to YouTube
or, I dunno, burn it to a DVD, whatever you want.
Hopefully though, this served as a short, simple introduction to editing.
My name’s Simon Cade, this has been DSLRguide and i’ll see you next week.