Are you still making your friends and family suffer through hours of uncut vacation highlights? Still playing tapes right from your camcorder without cutting out the bad shots? Still fast forwarding through the boring parts? Why? Video editing is now cheaper and easier than ever before! Just a

You stare morosely at your edit screen as Dexter Dimbulb says into the phone, "I’ll see you in…. (A long pause while he gropes for his line) …Detroit, tomorrow." That endless dead spot has to go but how? The answer is that all-purpose editing Band-Aid: The cutaway sho

When it comes to editing video on a computer, you first have to get your video onto the hard drive. The capture card that you choose depends largely on the type of camcorder that you own. You need an IEEE 1394 card if you have a digital (Mini DV or Digital8) camcorder, or a digitizing card if you ha

On-camera interviews demand just about every production skill going. To organize this sprawling topic we often split it into categories, offering one article on questioning techniques; another on production methods; a third on interview editing secrets. But now it’s time for a flyover survey s

Build Your Own Boom Need a boom pole to hold your mike for an occasional project, but don’t want to spend a lot of money to buy one? Why not build one instead? A telescoping pole with a suction cup, like the ones designed to install or remove light bulbs works great. Remove the suction c

When director James Cameron shot the scene of the departure of the S.S. Titanic on its fatal voyage, every dockside sign appeared in mirror type, every vehicle had its steering wheel on the wrong side and every man or woman’s costume was buttoned backward. Why? Because he’d built only th

Regardless of how you create them, titles set the stage for your videos. They tell your viewers who, where, when and what they are watching. Today you have more resources than ever for designing professional titles, even if you havent gone digital. Here, then, are a few choice ideas on newfangled

Manual Zoom for XL1 Adapted from Canons line of broadcast TV lenses, the XL14X Manual Zoom Lens conforms to the XL1s lens mount specification to allow for communication between the lens and XL1. The 14x lens is equivalent to a focal length of 41-577mm in a 35mm film camera. The XL14Xs manually cont

Artificial Canyons, Version 4 Bryce 4 ($199) MetaCreations Corp. 6303 Carpinteria Ave. Carpinteria, CA 93013 (805) 566-6200 www.metacreations.com First, there was Bryce, a clever yet powerful 3D landscape-creation software package that allowed

A Simple Studio for MPEG Video Pinnacle Systems has entered the parallel-port MPEG-creation market place with their Studio MP10, a product that extends their successful, easy-to-use Studio line of products into the multimedia CD-ROM and Internet video marketplace. Like other parallel-port MPEG-1-cre

Continuity is the complex craft of making the hundreds or even thousands of small parts of a program seem like a single, continuous whole. In big studio productions, perfect continuity is so important that crews always include a script supervisor to oversee it. Even script supervisors can’t c

While you may often overlook them, cables are the only way you to get a video signal from one piece of video gear to another. And like a steel chain, your editing system is only as strong as its weakest link. In many edit bays cheap cables are the weak link. Its ironic that video enthusiasts will

Those dozens or even hundreds of flips, flaps, flops, fly-ins and other athletic visual effects that signal a change from one scene to another are irresistible. You can make incoming shots tumble on-screen like circus clowns, pound the outgoing shots into the ground like stakes or float them toward

Visit any place where video editors work and you’ll likely find more than your share of cables: S-video cables, audio cables, power cables, composite video cablxes, headphone cables, microphone cables and cables for cable TV reception, among others. And if the cables aren’t confusing eno

Dot to Dot As a library media specialist who teaches a video production class, I’m always looking for ways to keep equipment and students organized. We’ve acquired a number of different camcorders during the years. I use colored adhesive dots (purchased from any discount or office suppl

Good to the Core PhEnix X2 Turnkey Nonlinear Editing System ($5765) Core Microsystems 96 Bonaventura Drive San Jose, CA 95134 (800) 886-2752 www.coremicro.com The best way for anyone to get into nonlinear editing is to buy a turnkey nonlinear editing system. With one, you can start editing video on

Imagine that it’s a quiet Friday evening. There’s nothing worth watching on TV, and you don’t want to brave the cold weather to trudge to the video store. You fire up your trusty PC/TV and log onto the Internet. With a few clicks of your remote control you surf to the Videomaker W

RAID Power for the Casablanca 26GB VideoRAID for Casablanca External RAID Device ($2050) DraCo Corporation 5485 Conestoga Court Boulder, CO 80301 (303)440-5311 www.draco.com The DraCo Casablanca is a self-contained video editing appliance. You buy the black box, hook your source deck and monitor to

Nonlinear Via USB Way back in March of 1997, Videomaker published a Benchmarks review of a then-new, inexpensive, hobbyist-level nonlinear video editing bundle for Macintosh called the Avid Cinema. Since then, both the Macintosh computer and the low-end nonlinear editing market have changed quite a

The concept is simple enough: a small box with IEEE-1394 FireWire and analog audio and video connections, designed to convert analog a/v signals to digital, and vice-versa. Sony’s DVMC-DA1 Media Converter is both easy to use and effective. Housed in a small gunmetal-gray plastic box, the Media