Beginners Guide To Pc Video Editing
By Scott Brown, Wed Dec 7th

If you're new to PC video editing then knowing where to startcan be a bit daunting, so hopefully this guide will point you inthe right direction.

To start with you will need a few items of equipment

Camcorders/Video Decks

Depending on your requirements or aims there are number ofdifferent solutions to discuss, so i will split these up intoseparate sections.

1.If you are starting from new then i recommend buying a newdigital camcorder, this will give you superior video and soundquality as well as making getting started in video editing verysimple, so ideal for the beginner. There are thousands to choosefrom catering for various types of budgets.

2. You may already have an old video deck or whichuses the old analogue outputs such as composite or s-video (besure to check first what outputs you have). For this kind ofsetup you would need a capture card/analogue to digitalconverter, this is discussed in more detail further on in thearticle.

A PC for Video Editing

It is now possible to easily capture footage from your DigitalCamcorder directly to your PC and edit it. If you looking atbuying a new PC or building a new one then the currents spec'sare more then powerful enough ,a typical spec PC these days is aP4, 512Mb Ram, 80Gb HDD, Windows XP or something along thoselines. You could always use your existing PC if you have one,but i wouldn't recommend using anything below a PIII 600.

Additional Hardware

When transferring video from your to your PC there area number of additional things to consider depending on the typeof your using. If you’re using a digital camcorderthen all your need is a firewire card (also known as an IEE1394card), a lot of current PC's have these as standard now,otherwise you will need to purchase the card separately. Some ofthese will come bundled with editing software such as AdobePremiere but this really depends on which card you buy and howmuch you spend, once your is connected to yourfirewire port windows will automatically

recognise your DigitalCamcorder. If your using the old analogue then youwill also need an analogue to digital converter, see the sectionon video editing cards below.

Speed?

Its worth considering your Pc's Processor speed, the speed willeffect the rate your video will encode, encoding is where yourDV video clips are converted into a more compressed format, forexample DVD's are encoded to MPEG2. So the faster the betterreally. Also consider the amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb wouldbe the minimum.

Extra Hard Drive Storage

Its worth considering having an extra dedicated drive for yourvideo footage, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GBof hard drive space so consider a large capacity hard drive suchas an 80Gb or 120Gb, also consider the disk drive RPM, at least7200RPM would be recommended. If your PC supports it (most newones do now), then a Serial ATA (SATA) drive will offerincreased date transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec compared to 100or 133 offered by the IDE drives, you may also consider a SCSIdrive if you’re PC has an SCSI adapter as standard.

DVD/CD Burners

If your planning on putting your film onto CD-ROM (VCD), or DVDthen a CDRW or DVDRW is an essential piece of kit, most new pc'smay have a CDRW or DVDRW as standard, to burn your DVD, you'llneed DVD authoring software. Video Editing Cards If you have andolder analogue video camera/deck then an analogue USB or PCIcapture cards will suffice. These dedicated analogue to digitalconverters take process of conversion away from the CPU andtherefore speeds up transfer. If worth getting a quality capturecard as the cheaper cards can produce mixed results,

The Video Editing Software

This is where all your creative work starts and the creativework starts, you can capture video from your camera, edit thecaptured clips, arrange them into a sequence, add transitions,credits and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready export yourmovie back to the camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD,VCD etc).

About the author:Founder of http://wwww.avmechanic.co.uk a Free Video Editing andComputer help community covering a wide range of topics.