Years ago, creating a film required a team of highly trained operators and some very sophisticated cameras, editing machines, and film processing equipment. Distributing it required making expensive reels and physically shipping them to each theater. It’s different now. For only a few hundred dollars you can get a very capable digital camera. To process the video produced by that camera, all you need is a PC and some software. And finally, distribution is easy: Just create a DVD or upload the video to a server, and there it is for everyone to see.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of taking footage from your camera, turning it into a computer file, editing it, and making a DVD.

The Beginning: Move Video To Your PC

For our example, we’re going to capture some holiday video, edit it to show just the exciting parts, and then create a DVD. The first step is to get the footage from the camera onto your computer.

Different cameras give you different options for copying video to your PC. Some cameras create a DVD or mini-DVD, which you can insert into your computer’s optical drive. Some use a removable memory card to store video; those cards can simply be inserted into a card reader attached to the PC; or the camera itself can be connected to the PC via a USB or FireWire port. One way or another, almost all cameras let you capture video, that is, take it from your camera and turn it into a file. That’s what we’ll do now.

First, connect the computer to the camera, using either a USB or FireWire cable. (Some cameras support both, but FireWire is the most popular vidcam interface.) Plug the camera into the PC and turn it on. Your camera’s users manual will tell you if any special software has to be installed in order for it to work with Windows. Most of the time, your system will recognize that a camera has been attached to it.

When capturing video, your computer acts like a VCR; you capture the video by clicking the software’s record button (possibly labeled Record, Start Capture, or something similar), and then pressing the Play button on the camera. As your camera plays back the recorded video, a Capture or Preview window shows what’s being played, while the computer records the video to a file. Click the Stop Capture button when the entire video has played.

Keep in mind that you may not have to worry about capturing the video. If your camera saves video to a mini-DVD or to an on-camera flash memory device, then the “capture” has already taken place; all you need to do now is move the data from the memory card or optical media over to the computer. That’s generally accomplished by using Windows Explorer to drag the file(s) over to a folder on your PC.

The Director’s Cut: Edit Your Video

In the old days, editing involved literally cutting pieces out of a strip of film and taping them together. Computers make it a lot easier. We’re going to take only the cool parts of our holiday footage, connecting them together to make an exciting vacation video. Modern digital video-editing is pretty simple: You use familiar Windows menus; toolbar buttons; and cut, copy, and paste commands. With most editing software, you can move scenes around by clicking and dragging the files or video segments.

Video footage from a camera can be saved in several different formats. The most common are probably AVI (Audio/Video Interleaved) or WMV (Windows Media Video), but some cameras record in Apple’s MOV (QuickTime Movie) format. We’ll add our vacation video to the timeline by dragging the file from Windows Explorer over to the timeline.

You can drag all sorts of media files to the timeline, including video files, sound files, and still pictures such as GIF and JPEG images. Most video-editing programs keep the video and audio files on separate parts of the timeline so that you can add sound to the video. Be careful to keep the audio and the video lined up. If video and audio don’t match, you can end up with a “badly dubbed Japanese monster movie” effect in which people’s mouth movements don’t match what they’re saying. For our vacation video, we’ll be adding a musical soundtrack, so we don’t have to worry about keeping mouth movements synchronized with a vocal track.

What we’ll do is edit the video track by deleting all the parts we don’t want. For starters, we can remove the “empty” section at the beginning. (This generally amounts to only a few seconds’ worth of “dead air” that results when you begin capturing before the camera actually starts its playback.) Just click the Play button, and the preview window shows the video playing. The slider starts moving as the video plays, and you can click the Pause button when you get to the beginning of something you want to keep. Use the Right and Left arrow keys on the keyboard (or the buttons on the Preview window) to make small adjustments to the slider position, and then use the Split Track command to cut the video at that spot. Now the video is cut into two pieces. Just click the piece you don’t want (in this case, the one at the beginning) and press the DELETE key. (Remember, while most programs operate similarly, your video-editing program’s interface may differ somewhat from our example.)

Now you’ve removed the video footage you don’t want, but you have some empty space in the timeline. Simply drag the video to the left with the mouse. Continue using this technique—cut around the unwanted footage and delete it, and then close the gap—to remove everything from the timeline except for the exciting parts you want to keep.

Now it’s time to add the musical score. First, you need to remove the existing sound. In our case, we click VacationVideo.AVI in the Audio 1 track and press the DELETE key.

Depending on the software you’re using, almost any kind of sound file can be used for your soundtrack. For this article, we’re using DeskShare’s Video Edit Magic ($69.95; www.deskshare.com), which allows us to use WAV, MP3, WMA (Windows Media Audio), and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files. Simply drag the file from the Media Collection and drop it onto either Audio Track. Make sure you place it all the way to the left so that it starts as soon as the video does. If one song isn’t long enough, simply drop another (or another copy of the first one) next to it.

Delivery Systems: Create& Distribute Your Movie

Now that you’ve edited your video, it’s time to create an actual movie that you can show to other people. For that, you need to think about how you’ll be sharing it.

DVD vs. Internet. There are several Internet services that will host your video clip, allowing anyone with Internet access to see your video, once you complete and post it. If you are planning to use a hosting service such as YouTube.com or VideoDesk.net, the exact format you choose will depend on the specific company’s requirements. If you’re going to make a DVD, that process has its own specific requirements. With DVDs, the quality will be high, but you’ll need to deliver the actual discs to your audience.

Create a DVD. The settings used to create a DVD are built into most video editors. In Video Edit Magic, just click the Make Movie button on the toolbar. You can select MPEG Formats (VCD, SVCD, and DVD), click Next, and choose which type of DVD to make. Select NTSC (National TV Standards Committee), which is the standard for TV and DVDs in the United States.

The only other setting for DVDs offered by the application we’re using is the aspect ratio. This is the ratio of width to height. Standard television is 1.333 times wider than it is tall, a ratio of 4:3. HDTV and most theatrical movies have wider ratios—a “wide screen” that usually displays using a ratio of 16:9. To make our holiday video, we should follow the shape of the image that the camera recorded; our particular camera recorded in 4:3, so we’ll stick to that.

The video editor creates a video file that is correctly formatted for a DVD, but in most cases that file will be saved to your hard drive; you’ll still need to burn the file to a DVD. There are many DVD authoring programs available to help you do that. In fact, if your PC came with a DVD burner, one may have come bundled with your system.

When burning the DVD, remember that there is a difference between simply moving data files over to the disc and creating an actual DVD that will be playable on home DVD players. In this case, you want to make sure that, whatever software you’re using, you select the option that creates a true video DVD, rather than a DVD data disc.

Video for the Internet. Of course, DVDs aren’t the only way to share your video. Services such as YouTube let people share their video over the Internet. Remember, though, that distribution by Internet is probably not the best solution for very long videos, and it does require that the person viewing it have a fairly fast Internet connection (or a lot of patience).

The best-known of the video-sharing services is YouTube, but YouTube imposes restrictions on the video you can upload. For instance, no matter what the image size of the video you upload, the service will reduce it to the size of its standard player. YouTube also imposes limits on file size and on the length of the video it accepts, so we’ll upload our vacation video to Video Desk, a sevice that allows any size and quality of video, but which requires the file to be in WMV format.

Because of that flexibility, we have more choices to make. One is the frame rate. All computer video is actually a series of still pictures that change multiple times every second. The number of changes per second is the frame rate. Theatrical movies change about 24 times per second, while American TV changes just under 30 times per second. Computer video varies. The frame rate you need depends on how much movement there is in the movie: Fast motion captured on video will look “jerky” if it’s played at too low a frame rate.

Another factor to consider is the image or frame size. All pictures (and this includes moving pictures) on a computer screen are produced using pixels, tiny colored dots that change color. The frame size of a movie is given in number of pixels wide by the number across. Some services limit your video to 320 x 240 pixels. (If you upload a video with a larger frame size, the service reduces it.) We’ll create our video with a resolution of 640 x 480. The downside of the bigger frame size is that it makes for larger files. A viewer with a slower Internet connection will either wait a long time for the video to start, or might have the video pause during playback.

The final number to select is the bit rate. All computer information is in bits, the smallest unit of information. The bit rate of a video file reflects how much data is sent each second. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality. Low bit rates mean a fuzzier picture, especially when the onscreen image changes rapidly. We’re looking for very good quality, so we’ll use Video Edit Magic’s 2,073Kbps (kilobits per second) setting. Any video editor will give you a range of bit rates from which to select; it’s a good idea to try a few different settings and see which one works best for you.

You’re ready to create the movie. Just click Next on the last screen of the Make Movie wizard. All you have to do now is upload the file. Most video services will help you display it on the service’s own page, embed it in your blog, or send a video email.

Ready To Go

You’re now ready to create your own movies, from filming through editing and distribution. There’s lots more you can do, once you get comfortable with the basics. For instance, you could add text to the video—as the director and editor, you surely want (and deserve) your name in the credits. With a little practice, you can create films that rival the pros’.

by Carl Fink