Video Editing for Dummies?

I have been there. I got a lot of help from the following discussion forums. Both are pretty good.

http://www.afterdawn.com/

http://forum.videohelp.com/

If you need to purchase a video-related equipment, you might want to visit

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ They have an amazing customer service.

When my organization asked me to purchase a video equipment, I visited this web site and talked with one of their experts.

After that, I can have a more clear picture on video equipment and editing etc...

Eamonn, you can do a lot of different things with a lot of different bits of advice.  I have found it helpful to focus on one piece of software first and really get the hang of that.  You might want to do lynda.com to work out all the features of your Vegas software as well.  That will go a long way.

There are some quick tutorials on YouTube:

Welcome to video editing!

Here's a good source for folks at all levels of video editing and production:

http://www.videomaker.com/

Best Regards,

Dave

Short and sweet. - Cut out the unnecessary content. Ask yourself if you would be willing to watch this video. I'm going to point you to a website I recently came across and this instructor teaches video editing.  http://www.danfergusdesign.com/classfiles/index.php

What I want you to focus on is his examples under his VCB335 course. I have done a lot of video editing and I honestly learned a lot from the examples that Dan posts on his website and I'm sure this will also give you some ideas about what to carve out and what to keep.

After you get it clipped, have your work peer reviewed by at least two to three other people. They will be able to tell you if something needs to be cut or what may need to be added or clarified.

Good luck

You might also consider finding someone in your area who uses Vegas and setting up a meeting (you could buy him or her lunch). You'll learn a lot more seeing someone actually use the editing software for an hour than reading about how to do it.

It's a little hard for me to be objective on the ease of learning how to edit because I've been doing it since Reagan was a first-termer and I learned on analog equipment. But once you get the core basics down (laying an audio bed, trimming clips, and adding transitions) you can probably pick up the rest on your own by experimenting.

Many thanks folks for all of the advice......not to digest it all

Hi Eammon,

Here are some tips more for the learning/presentation side of things:

• Keep your video to less than 10 minutes - spilt up videos which are more than 10 minutes and perhaps included in an Engage Interaction.
• Audio quality is more important than picture quality so if you have to downside the video due to bandwidth, best to play around with the picture quality settings.
• Try to have something different in the video every two minutes, such as a cut-away (e.g. cut to a still and just use the voice over from the video).
• For learning, interview style works well e.g. have someone ask a series of questions to the "presenter" - this also helps if the presenter is not that experienced in video work.
• I found that 320 x 180 gave me a good size for use in Articulate Presenter/Powerpoint (takes up about 1/4 of the slide).
• Go easy on the fancy transtions - they add to file size and can get annoying (just like PPT transitions). A simple cross-fade works well.
• Offer a low-bandwidth alternative, for example either strip out the audio track, create a transcript and or reduce the video picture quality.

Best of luck with the video edting.

Fiona.

Cheers for the info Fiona (and everybody else that has contributed )

Eamonn