Digital Video Editing I | Understanding the Basics

Course Developers: Caspar Stracke, Gabriela Monroy
Instructor: Bruce Bicknell
Editors: Gordon Drummond, Tara MacKay, Ethan Herr, Clara LaFrance

Understanding the Basics

Editors work with the space between frames. The best work often goes unnoticed by the viewer.

Editing film and video is about movement, choreography, the play of light, color, and graphics. And beyond all that, it's about human psychology.

A video editor deals with the threshold between two still images: the space between the frames, the turn of the page, the blink of the eye.

At its best, video editing is invisible. When the work is perfect, only the trained eye sees it. Conversely, every edit that is imperfect creates a distraction (though this too can be deliberately utilized!).

In this course, we will cover the basics of editing digital video. You'll explore techniques that can be applied in a range of non-linear editing programs (Premiere Pro, Final Cut Express, Avid Studio, iMovie, and so on). But the main focus of the course is not on developing computer skills alone. The goal is to convey and explore the magic behind video editing. We will explore concepts inherited from the old masters of cinema and examine how editing techniques have changed (and keep changing) in the new age of digital technology.

Overview of Non-Linear Editors

To explore the exciting world of digital video editing, you'll first need a digital video editing application (often called a non-linear editor or NLE) on your computer. We'll start by reviewing the tools available.

The digital editing systems most commonly used by professionals today are Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Avid Media Composer. Media Composer is the most thoroughly developed program and it has been the industry standard among professionals for many years. However, in the last decade, Adobe's Premiere Pro has emerged as a strong competitor due to its usability, cross-platform compatibility, and familiarity for existing Adobe product users.

Outside the professional realm, many more options exist. "Light" versions of many professional products are available: Premiere Elements, Final Cut Express, iMovie, and so on. These programs are typically pared-down versions of the complete product, ideal for introductory use but lacking some features that a professional would consider essential.

In spite of the minor differences in features, all video editing applications mentioned so far work in essentially the same way. You could learn the basics of video editing (and in fact develop some considerable skill) using any of these programs. For that reason, we have created this course to be accessible to video editing students with a range of programs and platforms.

Leaders in digital video editing software.

If you don't currently own a video editing program, we recommend Adobe Premiere Pro for this course. Apple's Final Cut Express is available for Mac as a less expensive option.

While both are excellent beginner non-linear editing programs, Premiere Pro is more robust. In this course, full directions for Premiere Pro are provided, as well as some notes for Final Cut Express. For the sake of simplicity, screenshots and instructions throughout the course will refer to Premiere Pro.

Download and import the time lapse clip.

If you already own another digital video editing program, you will still be able to complete all of the assignments in this course, but bear in mind that you may need to make some adjustments for differences in tools, commands, and the basic interface.

Before we start with the overview of your non-linear editing program, please download the time lapse clip we have prepared so you have some material to work with.

Please note that many of the files you will need for your lectures and exercises will be large and take awhile to download.

Exploring Your NLE Interface

Ready? Open your video editing software and you will see a dialog that prompts you to either select a project or create a new project.

In Premiere Pro, you'll start off with a project that uses the default settings shown here:

A new, untitled project in Premiere Pro.

At the bottom of the New Project dialog, you can name your project. Go ahead and title it "lesson-1." Now let's go over four main areas of the Premiere interface. As we go, I'll include a few notes for Final Cut Express when the instruction diverges from Premiere Pro.

The Project Panel

First there is the Project panel in which your bins, project settings, and clips (all of which are explained later) are all organized. You can find the Project panel in the top left. Here you will see tabs for each project and, depending on the context, an Effects tab. The Project panel is roughly equivalent to the "Browser" in other NLE programs, though you can create more than one bin within a given project.

You'll notice that right now there is only one file in the Project panel called "Sequence 1." Click this file once, then click the name again to rename it "Lesson1."

Go to File > Import and find the L1-timelapse.mov in the ZIP you downloaded. You will see its name appear in your Project panel.

The Premiere Pro interface with its key features labeled

The Source Monitor

Double-click the file you imported. You will see it open in the top video window. This window is the Source Monitor (or the Viewer in Final Cut) which is used to inspect and prepare the selected clips before assembling them into an edited sequence. Usually this preparation just requires searching for the right moment in a scene and setting "in" and "out" points with markers; you'll learn how to do this later. You can watch your clip by pressing the play arrow in the Source Monitor.

Notice the blue playhead moving slowly underneath the clip and the timecode running on the bottom left corner of the window. Press the spacebar to stop or start playing at any point—your first and most basic keyboard shortcut! This tip applies to the Source Monitor, Timeline, and Project Monitor windows.

Imported clip playing in the Source Monitor

The Timeline

The Timeline window is a fairly simple and intuitive graphical representation of your edited sequence. The Timeline is where the edit comes together. As each clip is represented as a horizontal block, we can easily get a feeling for the length and duration of clips and compare them to one another.

Click and drag the image from the Source Monitor to the Timeline, dropping it in the first video track (Video 1), like so:

Drag and drop the timelapse clip into your sequence. Click the play button above to see this process in action.

CS6 users may receive a "Clip Mismatch" warning. This simply means the clip settings and the sequence settings do not match and you have the choice to either keep existing sequence settings or change sequence settings. Click "Change Sequence Settings" and it will automatically tranform your sequence to the correct settings for your clip. This is a really handy tool for getting setup quickly!

The clip will then be placed on the timeline with a yellow bar above it, meaning it is rendered and ready for preview.

Other users with mismatched clip and sequence settings may notice a red line appear above the clip in the Timeline. This means it is not yet fully rendered and therefore unviewable in real time at 100% resolution in the timeline. The reason for this is that Premiere, like most NLE programs, is set up with specific sequence settings to play back and render video at a certain frame rate, compression, audio format, and pixel aspect ratio, among other properties.

In order to preview video clips that don't have those desired properties, you can render them by going to Sequence > Render Effects in Work Area, or by pressing Enter (PC) or Return (Mac) with the clip selected.

Keep in mind that you can still work with unrendered footage. Premiere will do its best to render the video in the Program Monitor in real time. The only disadvantage is that it won't display at 100% resolution and will appear a bit pixelated.

Notice the Timeline has its own playhead, which can be controlled the same way as the Source Monitor's. When you drag the playhead to any point on a clip in the Timeline, you'll see a preview of the clip in the upper right window, the Program Monitor...

The Program Monitor

The fourth window in the interface is called the Program Monitor. It shows an image of the frame that the playhead is sitting on in the timeline.

Drag the clip to the timeline and see it playing on the Program Monitor.

You can press play underneath the Program Monitor to see the playhead on the Timeline slowly run over the clip, giving you accurate information about where you are in time.

Try using the spacebar on your keyboard to play/pause your clip, or the J-K-L keys to rewind, pause, or fast forward, respectively. Notice that when you press J or L twice or more, the video rewinds or fast forwards at double or triple speed! This is very helpful when looking for a specific moment in your video while editing.

Note About Other NLEs

Each digital video editing program includes different tools. Sometimes the tools are located in different places, often in small floating windows or tabs. In Premiere Pro, they are located above the Project panel. In Final Cut Express, they are located to the right of the Timeline.

The good news is that in most programs, for most functions, you don't have to change your cursor by selecting a different tool. There is a lot of drag and drop, and cut and paste. Premiere Pro and other programs sometimes allow you up to three different solutions for the same action: from the top menu, using key commands, and using right-click (PC) or Control-click (Mac) functions. So, if you are a graphic designer, you will find that many of your old Photoshop shortcut habits can be transferred, saving you lots of time.

Note: If you are using Premiere Pro, you may want to bookmark some of the free tutorials offered on the Adobe site. Final Cut Express tutorials are located here on the Apple site. They will be a helpful supplementary resource to this course.

Digital Video Fundamentals

To learn how to edit digital video (and discover just how creative you can be!), it's important to understand how today's non-linear editing environment came about. In this part of the lecture, we'll explore the differences between analog video and digital video. These are terms and concepts that any film student must master.

Analog Versus Digital Video

The word "analog," in general use, is used to describe any fluctuating, evolving, or continually changing process. Information is transmitted by modulating a continuous transmission signal, such as by amplifying a signal's strength or varying its frequency.

In video, analog refers to changing the original signal acquired (by a camera) into something that represents the signal—in this case, into a waveform. In analog tape formats like VHS, S-VHS, Hi-8, or Beta SP, the video signal is stored on magnetic tape as an analog waveform.

A waveform is a continuous stream of information that varies in frequency or strength.

A digital system is one that uses numbers for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display, rather than the continuous spectrum of values in an analog system. A film on a DVD, a movie from the Web, or a video recorded on a MiniDV tape are all examples of video stored digitally.

When using a digital video camera, the video signal is not transformed into a waveform, but through sampling it is translated into a system of ones and zeroes (binary information).

A digital video file stores continuous information as binary values.

Digital video information is literally stored as a series of ones and zeroes. That means that when you capture video material to your hard drive, or to another tape, the process is the same as copying any other digital files (Photoshop, Flash, Word, and so on) from one disk to another, it's just that the data being copied happens to be video.

The focus in this course is on digital video, though you'll find that techniques and terms from the analog world often come into play. Let's delve deeper and learn some of the important properties of digital video.

Digital Video Is Lossless

First of all, no matter how often a digital file is copied, the copy is always identical to the original. This is not the case when you copy analog materials, such as VHS tapes.

When you duplicate an analog tape, the copy has a slightly lower quality. If you repeat this process several times, and use the duplicate to make more copies, your videotape may become unwatchable. Repeated playback also increases the wear and tear on your original source tapes. Successive copies are called generations and the change in image quality is called generational loss.

Analog generational loss: After a few copies of copies, the quality of an analog video can be too low for use.

When a digital video file is copied, the same ones and zeroes are used to create the copy. It is not a dub, it is a clone. As the copy is indistinguishable from the original, there is no generational loss.

This is one of the great advantages of digital video because it offers tremendous creative freedom to the editor. As long as you use a digital interface (like a FireWire cable) to connect your DV camera/deck to your computer when capturing, there will be no generational loss. You can make as many copies as you like and they will all look as good as the original.

Digital Video Editing Is Non-linear

Film editing began as a non-linear medium. In the early days of cinema, a film editor would cut and splice her film to edit it (most early editors were women), and therefore she could work in any order she wanted. Like today's digital editors, she had what is called random access to her material. She could always go back to any scene and change its length. Or if she wanted to rearrange a section in the middle, she could do it by splicing and taping the film back together, without affecting the rest.

Early film editors at work	Tape was used to join, or splice, the film pieces back together.

So why do we use the terminology "non-linear editing" today? It's because linear editing was the rule in the early days of analog video.

Linear editing was done with two or more video decks, which were used to record different scenes to a master tape. Tapes were not physically spliced—instead, editors copied one shot after the other to a master tape. So video editing was done sequentially, working from beginning to the end.

Old-fashioned analog video editing with a two-deck/two-monitor set-up

As you can imagine, analog video editing was a tedious and time-consuming process! If you wanted to change a series of shots in the middle of your edit, you would have to re-edit everything that occurred after the change.

Today's non-linear editing environment is (thankfully) very different. As in the old days of splicing tape, you can work in any order you wish. Because your video editing software can access your video files in any order, you can edit and make changes to your sequence at any stage. You can easily cut, paste, add, and delete material, which means that in digital editing you have random access to any part of the footage (you don't have to "rewind" to get from the end of the footage to any other part).

Work on your digital video project in any order.

This modularity or variability in digital editing functions on several levels. It allows you to take any approach you want. You can start with the crucial moment in the story or with the end. Whichever approach works best for you, digital editing makes it possible.

Digital Video Editing Is Non-Destructive

What you are actually creating in your editing software is a virtual assembly. When you edit, you are not disturbing the video files themselves. You are only giving the computer instructions for what to do with the media files stored on your hard drive. This is a fundamental difference from analog systems, which produce what is, rather dramatically termed, a destructive assembly of film.

Every time that you look at a sequence in your video editing system, the images are instantaneously assembled for you as you watch. If you want to do something completely different with a scene, your edits will only change the instructions. In a mechanical or an analog system, you have to undo version A before you can create version B (destroying version A in the process).

In non-destructive editing, the clips within your video project are pointers to your captured source files, not the actual source files themselves. A video timeline is comparable to a musical score. Just as the sheet music refers to instruments and indicates when they should play, the project refers to media files and when they should play.

The timeline is comparable to a musical score

For example, if you edit a clip into a sequence and cut it short, the segment that you edited out is not gone forever. It can be edited back in at any time because the source media file on disk has not been touched. Even if you delete an entire clip from your project, it will still exist on your hard disk, stored in the folder to which you captured it, until you manually delete it from there (making sure to keep backups of your originals!). If you decide to manipulate the picture by changing the colors or distorting the image, your editing software creates a new media file. Your original media files remain untouched.

 

The Digital Editor's Workflow

So how do video editors do their jobs? As you work through this course, you will get a feel for the editing workflow.

Besides cutting or trimming clips, editing involves importing (or capturing) files and exporting them (which most of the time involves mastering to a tape). The editing workflow can be summarized in these three basic steps:

	1. Input. This usually consists of capturing or digitizing, in other words loading video material from source tapes into the computer and/or importing material (such as already digitized files, like sound files or graphics made in other programs) into a project. 2. Editing. This is where the material is categorized. The shots are cleaned up and organized to create sequences to be used as building blocks and assembled in a final video sequence. Also, in this stage, sound will be edited and mixed, and transitions and titles will be added to create a finalized video piece. 3. Output. After the edit is done, you have a number of options for outputting your final sequence. These range from transferring to tape, to exporting a QuickTime movie for uploading to the Web or for burning onto a DVD.

We will focus on all the three areas in this course. The last step, exporting, is particularly important, as tiny mistakes (like using the wrong compression settings) can lead to an unsatisfying presentation of your efforts. In this lecture's exercise, we'll concentrate just on Step 2, editing.

Key Editing Terms

Editing terminology can help us understand how to organize our video projects. As you know from other graphic software programs, the names of many software tools and techniques are based on ones that existed (and functioned well) long before computers were developed. "Desktop" and "folder" are just two examples.

A film editor organizing his clips in bins

A project in most editing software is the top-level file that holds all the media files associated with a program. It is used to organize the work done on on your video project. Bins, rundowns, and settings are organized in the Project panel.

A bin is just a folder inside the Project panel. It is the container for your clips, transitions, graphic files, sound files, media file pointers, and assembled sequences. It can be used to write notes and comments about your footage, rename items, and so on. The term "bin" refers to the container that film editors used for hanging and organizing the film clips they were planning to include in an edit.

A clip is an individual section of a video, audio, or a graphics project. It is essentially a database entry that points to the digital file stored in your computer. It gives instructions to your editing program, so it knows what segment to play from the media file stored on your hard drive (the in and out points, which we'll see in depth shortly).

In the Project panel you can toggle between Bins, Settings, Clips, and File Information..

 

The term "clip" refers to each of the individual bits of film hanging on the bin that the film editor selected before taping them together into a sequence.

You can create as many bins as you need to organize your material. Also, you can duplicate as many clips as you need.

A sequence is nothing more than a bundle of clips cut up and pieced together. It's what you are looking at in the timeline window, the visual representation of your compiled movie. In a Premiere project, you can create any number of sequences you like. Just remember while you are editing that each one is its own distinct movie and must be exported separately.

With any item in your Project Panel selected, press Ctrl+Shift+/ (PC) or Command+Shift+/ (Mac) to duplicate it.

Two Styles of Editing

Finally, while exploring your NLE is definitely fun, always remember that a significant component of the digital editing process resides outside your computer, inside your head.

As the renowned film editor Walter Murch explains in his book In The Blink of an Eye, there are two general styles of editing that can be compared to the fundamental difference between carving in marble and sculpting in clay.

When working with marble, you start with something in front of you, the sculpture is already there, hiding within the stone, and you reveal it by carving away. When you work with clay, you start with nothing in front of you, and you add material, assembling the parts, piece by piece.

Some video editors prefer to work with one piece in the timeline and cut out the unwanted scenes, whereas others prefer to organize hundreds of many sub-clips to piece together. You can carve an edit out of one single long digitized clip, or sculpt many smaller pieces into a whole.

As you will learn, there are very few hard-and-fast rules on what is an appropriate technique for a specific video style or genre. It is rather a question of individual taste. The fact that digital information can be re-arranged like a deck of cards allows a multitude of possibilities and combinations. Digital information can be compared to an earthworm: it grows new ends when cut into two halves. You can cut a video clip in two and place each of the resulting pieces in two different locations. But, if you pull back the clip ends, the rest of the omitted part will be revealed again.

Now that you've got a feel for your editing program interface and the basic principles of video editing, let's move on to your first exercise to try out some of the basic editing tools, and see how files are organized in a project!

Discussion Which approach works best for you? Share your thoughts and opinions with other students at the Discussion Boards. Exercise Create two video sequences using the two editing approaches: carving an edit out of one single long clip and assembling a montage of several clips into a whole.