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Video Editing October 24, 2008

Posted by admin in : Film, Video , add a comment

Been playing around with Adobe Premier Elements 7 to make some homemade DVDs. Had to make one for my parent’s 50th anniversary, for example, and made a couple with Yosemite trip videos. It’s not a pro app, more of a hobbyist or non-professional user, but still it’s a nice way to edit simple home videos. I have never been much of a graphical artists — I never got into creating Flash for example, or creating other graphics or image editing beyond the minimum to make something look halfway decent on a web page. Technically I’ve always been stronger in server side application coding or high level application design, but weak on graphical design. I can recognize good UI design, and I know what client code can and should do, but it’s something I’d rather other people actually did.

Creatively I’ve been comfortable with words, lyrics, songwriting, and even painting a little bit, but not so much with computer graphics. I used to be able to take decent photographs using my old Pentax K-1000, but I still don’t have a digital SLR and my dig cam pix have always come out looking like snapshots and not art. I have a video camera but a shaky hand and not much skill in generating video footage.

But I have discovered a pleasure and a little bit of an ability to edit video. More of an interest than a skill right now, but I’m a little surprised that it’s something I can do.

So I guess video editing is a thing unto itself, it’s a niche — not photography, not cinematography, not direction, but editing. I guess I used to fantasize about making movies, being a director. I don’t think I would be good at that — a director is like an orchestra conductor — it’s about managing this complicated campaign of people, sets, actors, crew, etc. I’m sure I am incapable of that sort of thing. I am neither obstinate or mean enough to dominate a crew with my artistic vision like a Hitchcock, nor smooth and diplomatic enough to deal with all these personalities.

But video editing, that’s not that different from what I do now, socially speaking anyway, which is working alone in front of a computer all day.  I’d like to experiment a little bit with it now that I have a little taste. Try to pull in some sort of footage from other sources, and mixing it up to learn what possible effects I can create that way. I should probably do that with better tools like After Effects and Premier Pro and other tools once I get the hang of it.

I’m probably years away from having anything to show , but it’s a new part of the brain to exercise.