The Joy Of Modern Video Equipment

The vacation to Hawaii 1997, your high school reunion 1990, the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, and so on...

All these milestone experiences in you life you have recorded on video and stored away safely on tapes. Although it is rarely anyone besides the photographer that actually view these tapes, they are occasionally dusted of for public display.

- Hey, fast forward to that really great episode - you know when...

The audience/guests have lost interest in the "show" long ago and are by now, out of pure courtesy, really struggling to look at least somewhat interested. And as there really is no logical way to follow the events being presented (without having experienced them yourself), this is hardly surprising.

Granted, the above scenario is somewhat exaggerated. But I sure know I have been in situations like this - both as the video enthusiast and in the audience - and I am sure you have too. Moving pictures intended for some kind of public display need to be edited in order to become coherent and appealing to an audience.

Thanks to the rapid development of the personal computer, every owner of a video camera can today have access to a video editing studio of very high quality. It is these, and related fantastic possibilities that I will write about on this blog.

From Tapes to Computers

We need to go back in time only about ten years, for a time when the video amateur's editing system of choice where basically a couple of VCR's with more advanced recording functions. For a reasonable investment you had the possibility of making color corrections, adding text and making various transitions. This kind of system works to this day of course, but there is absolutely no comparing it to the speed, flexibility and upgrade ability that an ordinary PC and the appropriate software can give you today - setting you back no more than what the "advanced" video editing systems of the past did.

I have been fiddling with video editing on the computer as long as it has been economically possible for me and I hope to share some of my experiences in future posts on this blog.