Five-minute Film Editing Education For Video Buffs
Digital film editing, or non-linear editing, is a modern editing method used by both film and television postproduction. It involves the ability to access any frame in a video clip in a "cut and paste" fashion. Non-linear editing is a non-destructive method that began to appear with the introduction of digital video technology.
To start off, video and audio data are digitized and then layer recorded directly onto hard disks devices. Once imported, they can now be edited on a computer using a video editing software. In digital film editing one can expect to easily retrieve the original footage, as they are not lost during editing. The digital film editing software creates a record of the decisions made by the film editor via an inventory called the EDL, or an edit decision list.
The advantage of using digital film editing is being able to have variations of the original files without having to store many different copies, and this makes for very flexible editing. It is also quite easy to revert and undo past choices by simply accessing the edit decision list or EDL. This can be done without duplicating the actual film data. One can also avoid the loss of film quality because you do not need to repeatedly re-encode your data every time you wish to apply different kinds of effects or transitions.
Digital film editing or non-linear editing is definitely a more flexible tool compared to the linear method of tape-to-tape editing because of its random access and easy project organization. Using the edit decision lists found in the video editing software, a film editor can also choose to work on low-resolution copies of the film. In this way, a film editor can easily and quickly edit both broadcast quality and high definition quality film on a normal PC which does not have the capability to do the full processing task of the huge full-quality high-resolution data in real-time. The good news for amateur and budding film editors: the costs of editing systems have dropped such that non-linear editing tools are currently within the budget of home users and starting-out editors. Some of these editing software can even be accessed free of charge as web applications, like Cinelerra, a software that is focused on the professional market. Others, like Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker or Apple Computer's iMovie, are pre-installed in the package should you wish to purchase their operating systems. One requirement for digital film editing is a video capture card used to capture analog video or a FireWire connection designed to capture digital video from a DV camera, apart from a video editing software. A lot of the modern web based editing systems can now take video directly from a camera phone sent via GPRS or 3G mobile connection, and can even be edited through a web browser interface. To put it simply and succinctly, a computer used for video editing does not necessarily require any installed hardware or software beyond a web browser and an Internet connection.
| 
