Movie Making Made Easy
Editing your home movies is easier than ever. Here's a step-by-step guide to get you started.
January 24, 2003
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Apple's iLife comes with editing and DVD-burning software |
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STEP TWO: EDIT YOUR MOVIE Once you've imported all the scenes you think you might want to include, you're ready to start editing. You'll use a storyboard or timeline to arrange individual video clips and other elements, dragging and dropping them into place. The best consumer programs will walk you through the steps required to trim scenes and add special effects and stylistic touches, but you should peruse the FAQs in the About or Help section so that you're familiar with the tools and controls before you start.
Transitions are a quick and easy way to make your movie look professional. Most basic editing programs offer at least a few choices, like "cross fade" (when the end of one scene fades into the beginning of the next), "wipe right" (one scene pushes the other off stage) and my personal favorite, "radial" (a circular sweep). For subtitles and credits, these editing programs will give you lots of fonts and colors to choose from, with knobs for adjusting size, placement and duration.
Another fun trick: slow and fast motion. You can achieve both by simply adjusting a scene's playback speed, usually by clicking and sliding a knob. (I found this particularly useful for my Christmas movie. It takes my two-year-old ages to unwrap a gift, but I wanted to show him ripping open at least one from start to finish.) But keep an eye on the time. If you slow something down, it will run longer. Speed something up and it will end a lot quicker, something to keep in mind if you're putting your movie to music.
And speaking of music, many editing programs let you pull songs right off a CD that you put in your CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you'll need to import a song that's already in a digital file format, such as .wav ("wave") or MP3. Use a digital music manager such as MusicMatch or RealOne to rip songs off audio CDs, or use a file-sharing service to download some tunes off the Internet. (Of course, if you're planning on making multiple copies of your movie, or posting it on a website, there are copyright issues to consider.)
Once you've imported a song into the project, you'll drag and drop it onto the audio portion of the timeline, then use sliders to mark the beginning and end of the clip you want to use, and when during the movie it should play. One approach is to put a song in first, then cut your video to match the length of the song. I didn't think to do this until it was too late, and found myself adding extra scenes just so I could include all of Led Zeppelin's Hotdog. You can adjust the volume of both the background music and the video's own audio track (what the camcorder picked up while filming) scene by scene, making one louder than the other or muting one altogether.
With all of these tools, the software is designed to make most of the decisions for you, so you don't have to fuss too much. This is great, but once you get the hang of things, you might find yourself wanting more flexibility. If so, consider making the leap to Apple's Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, though these programs are much more expensive and you'd probably need hands-on training by an experienced user before you'd be able to fly solo.
If you're in a rush, check if your editing software can do it's own flashy edit of the scenes you've captured. Roxio's VideoWave Movie Creator offers CineMagic; Sony's MovieShaker has a Shake mode that lets you choose a theme—romantic, happy, and some crazy setting that uses dance club music. It's fun to see what the program will come up with, and it does seem to detect the most precious moments, like the two seconds my seven-month-old decided to look up into the camera. I've already added a couple shakes to my library that I'm proud to pass off as my own.
A few last bits of advice: Don't muck up your movie with too many special effects. It's how you slice and dice the scenes that counts. And remember that 10 seconds is practically an eternity in movie-time, not to mention 10 minutes. So keep it short. And don't be afraid to experiment. You can trim and re-trim every scene to your heart's content, and the original version that you've captured onto your PC will remain intact.
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