Digital editing creates useful home videos

BY LARRY MAGID
Special to the Mercury News
October 4, 2001

If you have kids, you probably have a video camera. And if you bought it in the last year or so, it could very well be a digital video (DV) camera that makes it relatively easy to transfer video from your camera to your PC or Mac.

Even if you have an older ``analog'' camera, there are still ways to capture that video on your PC.

The reason you want to capture video to your PC is so you can edit tapes. I have miles of footage from when my kids were little, but every time I sit down to watch one of those old tapes, I see footage of the inside of my lens cap and my feet not to mention scenes of my kids crying, yelling or dribbling. There are also those long zooms of people I no longer recognize and lots of other junk footage.

That's one of the reasons why home videos are so boring. Unlike the home movies that my dad took, there is essentially no cost associated with shooting as much video as you want, so we have a tendency to capture memories that, frankly, we could just as soon forget.

Before I got a digital video camera, I had an 8mm analog model that I used when my kids were little. I would occasionally dub some of those old 8mm tapes over to VHS tapes. The good part was that I'd wind up with tapes that could play on any home VCR. The bad part was that the edits were very choppy and the ``second-generation'' tape wasn't as good as the original.

Digital editing

Enter digital editing. By cutting out those flubs and irrelevant scenes, we're left with videos that might actually worth watching and sharing. What's more, with a good video-editing program, you can make your videos even more appealing by adding titles, transitions and sounds. Finally, digital video makes it easier to share our creations. You can send friends copies of your video on CD-ROM to play on their PCs, you can make video CDs (VCD) that can be played on some home DVD players and, if you're willing to spend several hundred dollars on a DVD burner, you can create your own DVDs that can be played on most (but not all) home DVD players. You can also create short videos that can be posted to a Web site or e-mailed to friends.

Just about all video-editing programs can capture video directly from your digital camera and, once you're done editing, you can save it back to digital tape or save it as a computer file to be viewed on a PC or transferred to other media, including DVD or CD. For this to work, both your video camera and your PC must be equipped with a FireWire (also known as 1394 or iLink) port. All Macs come with FireWire and it's an option on PCs. If your PC doesn't have a FireWire port, you can add one for under $50 for a desktop and about $100 for a laptop.

Even if you have an analog video camera or old tapes, you can still import them into the PC for editing. Hollywood DV Bridge from Dazzle ($300) is a hardware device that serves as a bridge between an analog recover and a PC. One end plugs into the video out port of your camera or player and the other into your PC or Mac's FireWire port. Another option is to get a digital video camera with an analog input and use the camera as a bridge between your old device and your PC.

A less expensive -- but far less elegant -- solution is Studio Online from Pinnacle Systems. This $70 hardware/software combination allows you to transfer footage from an analog device using your PC's USB port, but the video is highly compressed, which results in a low-quality image.

Windows Millennium and Windows XP come with Windows Movie Maker, a free video-editing program that's quite rudimentary but good enough to give you a taste of what video editing is all about. The Mac comes with a better and easier to use program called iMovie which not only lets you crop and edit tape but allows you to add transition, titles, sound and video effects.

Windows users who are serious about video editing will need to buy software such as Pinnacle Studio 7.0, from Pinnacle Systems -- a robust and reasonably easy to use program that covers all the basics with just enough advanced features to keep you growing for awhile. The $99 program comes with a FireWire card for desktop PCs so it -- along with a digital video camera -- is all you need to get started.

Encourage the kids

If you have a video camera, by all means encourage your kids to use it with proper supervision so it's not broken or abused. I've let my kids use our camera on several occasions to make their own movies.

Before you jump on the digital-video bandwagon, be warned that the process, while not terribly difficult, can be very time-consuming. It's one of those open-ended processes that can drive you nuts, especially if you're perfectionist. We're all accustomed to Hollywood's special effects and smooth editing which, to a limited degree, are now possible for those of us with digital video gear. But there is a reason why those Hollywood products cost tens of millions of dollars and involve scores of people.

If you're looking for a more accessible target to emulate, watch local TV news, where producers, directors and technicians have learned to get their point across with a minimum amount of production cost and delays.