Basic Video Editing, Part 3

The Only Editing Techniques You'll Ever Need Today's video editors come with many tools. They are a veritable cornucopia of filters that will slow your footage down or speed it up and transitions that will wipe from one shot to the next or look like a page is turning. They'll let you add echo to your audio tracks or invert all the colors. But, just because you have these things doesn't mean that you need to use them. You can have a long and fruitful career editing video using only a very small number of techniques. Of course, as your videos get more advanced, you'll find uses for some esoteric footwork, but 90% of video editing revolves around just a handful of things.

The cut:
This is the most basic of all video edits. One shot stops and immediately the next one begins. Nearly all of your transitions should be cuts. Look in the Videomaker archives for tips on making your cuts work such as Editing 101 (www.videomaker.com/article/12654) and Cutting on Action (www.videomaker.com/article/13536).

Fades:
This is probably the second most common transition. With fade in, the screen starts black and slowly your shot appears. With fade out, your shot slowly gets darker until everything is black. Fades are often used at the beginning and end of movies or to show that time has passed between scenes. Sometimes one shot fades directly into another instead of to black - this is called a cross fade or a cross dissolve.

Titles:
Adding titles allows you to not only inform your audience about what they're going to see ("Baby's First Day at the Dentist!"), but what they're seeing now in the form of subtitles ("Built in 1847") and to let people know extra things at the end ("For more information, see our website..."). Careful use of titles can help speed your project along without long-winded introductions. Choose titles and fonts based upon the type of background they'll be in front of - white text on a light background will have your audience squinting, Sometimes a black outline on the font or putting a solid color behind the titles helps a great deal.

Insert editing:
This is a great technique which involves using one long master shot and splicing in a cutaway, keeping the master shot's audio track. This is useful because you don't have to match audio between two pieces of footage. A good example of when to use insert editing is a graduation video. Keep a master shot on the speaker and Junior getting his diploma, then during other parts of the ceremony pick up some audience reaction shots, the Goodyear Blimp flying over, etc. which you can insert edit (just the video) to cover times when you zoom the camera in or out or just to keep the scene from being static.

Audio dubbing:
In Hollywood the sound recorded on location is very often not used in the final product because of difficulty in getting microphones in the proper places or background noise from the location. Lots of audio is actually recorded later and then over-dubbed - this is a process called Foley. Though you probably won't be dubbing dialog, you will find opportunities to record voiceovers - narration tracks that you can put over the video - and sounds. Does your trip to the beach lack the barking of seagulls you were hoping for? Put them in later! You can't have Bigfoot leap out of the forest without a terrifying roar, so dub it in.
It's also very common to add music to video productions. In Hollywood, it's always added later. All those scenes in loud clubs are actually filmed with no music, and the music is added after the footage is edited. This is so that you can cut from one shot to another without making the song playing in the background jump forwards or backwards.

SOURCE: http://www.videomaker.com/article/14223/