Chapter 5. Editing Techniques

We've shot our video, now it's time to capture and edit it into final form. Though many detailed books have been written on video editing, we can break it down into a seven-step process and cover the most important points in a single chapter when you're producing for business or educational use, the editing is typically focused and simple.

Of our three scenarios executive briefing, group discussion, and interview the interview is clearly the most complex from an editing perspective; you'll be weaving multiple sources of video, interview footage, cutaways, and noddies into one video. For this reason, I'll use interview footage to demonstrate the points made in this chapter.

I'll start by describing how to split, trim, sequence, and integrate your clips into a cohesive video; these in my view are among the most important tasks we discuss in this book. I'll describe how to create titles and credits, covering issues such as where to put your titles, which fonts to use, and how to make them legible when streaming at low bitrates. Then I'll discuss still-image overlay, including how to add your logo or watermark to the video, and conclude with a quick look at fading in and out of your video.

Admittedly each video is different and requires customized fine tuning. However, the steps outlined here probably account for 90 to 95percent of your editing efforts on each project, and should get you a long way towards completion.