Video editing programs allow you to create and modify video files and export them in a number of formats. While using such programs you will most likely encounter tasks such as video cropping, video/audio transitions, creating/adding special effects and titles. A good video editor should be intuitive, flexible, allowing for nearly endless options, and easy to use, while not sacrificing many features. Serving as the hub for all your video projects your editor must also be reliable, compatible and readily able to perform a variety of video editing task sufficiently.

Free Video Editors

If you are just starting out with video editing or your thinking of, then I would suggest first trying out free or inexpensive video editors. These free downloads or demo’s often won’t have all the features of functions of bought software but they will be helpful for getting a feel for editing, and some basic functions. These programs are usually shareware or freeware and they’re not generally available in retail stores. There are a wide variety of video editors available online, all you need to do is too find the one to match your requirements.

Beginner Editors

These type of programs offer core video editing features with an emphasis on ease of use. They often include helpful wizards to walk users through common tasks such as cropping video, adding titles or music and other basic tasks. Good editors should also include built in tutorials or help sections for getting started of if you have any questions. In addition the program interface will generally be very straightforward, basic, and fairly easy to navigate. Many of these editors come pre-loaded with presets or professionally-designed templates to assist novice users in achieving polished results right away. But some of these editors may sacrifice ease of use for more advanced features, this can often result in frustrated users after they have progressed from the learning stages and wish too have more flexibility with their programs. Some basic video editors even come with new computers like Windows Movie Maker, and iMovie. Overall beginner video editors have good features to get you started off in the right direction and are great for recreational movie makers. The prices for such programs can be anywhere in between 0-$150. Continue reading »

How often do we hear people that have careers complain about never doing the job they were trained to do? They did not realize when they entered into their chosen field that there would be many aspects to the job.

The same premise applies with the video game artist. Before really researching the subject many would be artists think it is just a matter of sitting down and designing a game and then putting it into production and it is ready to play. It does not quite work that way. If it did there would probably be even more games on the market than there already are. Video game artists have such a variety of jobs to do that many of these jobs have somewhat evolved into becoming specialties.

A good example of this is the concept artist. In other words the idea maker. It is his job to be creative and dream up the various characters and the types of atmosphere it will demand.. Once it is put to paper it is scanned into the computer and it is cleaned up using a software program with these types o Continue reading »

Today’s editing computers are a marvel in my opinion. Did you know that before computers, it took around one million dollars of equipment to stock a professional editing room? You needed multiple tape decks, a switcher, an effects generator, a character generator, an audio mixer, signal enhancers, multiple monitors and years of experience to operate it all.
To rent out all this stuff by the hour, it cost $500-$1,000 per hour to edit. A thirty second spot could easily take ten hours to edit, even a relatively simple one. That’s ten grand just for one step in the production of something that lasts half a measly minute!

Ouch!

We’ve got it great compared to that. Today, ten grand is More than enough to buy a total system and all the software you’d ever need to edit a lifetime of shows.

Computer editing is loads of fun and the creative possibilities are endless.

Computer editing revolutionized the entire television and video production indus Continue reading »