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Using free editing software to make a video

It is entirely possible today to make a film with a standard PC using free editing software. Chances are it's not going to be an epic 3 or 4 hour classic, but for something along the lines of 20 minutes or so, it is entirely feasible.

Let's split the process into five chunks and see what's out there:

1) Capture:

How do you get your footage off the camera/camcorder/ and into the PC? You go through a process known as capture. Windows Movie Maker has a capture facility which will transfer the footage onto your PC. Open WMM and click 'File/Capture video' This will require you to have a capture card (or at least an IEEE or firewire input). If you are trying to capture to anything other than this (such as through a USB cable) the chances are this will cause problem as USB cannot handle the speed of data for video capture. Consult your camera or capture card for more details on this. If you're on a Mac the supplied iMovie will also allow you to import directly from a Firewire equipped digital camcorder. Of course with the Mac if you have a built-in iSight camera on your machine you can record directly from that

2) Editing:

Let's assume you want to do something fairly straightforward such as sequence, trim and render your footage from your last vacation. I would suggest something like VideoSpin as the tool. It is a free tool made by Avid - who are THE industry leaders in video editing running most of the editing in Hollywood. It's basic, easy to use and reasonably functional. More recently the advent of on-line editing has allowed this to become very much a 'free' service. Remember, though, the downside to on-line editing is the huge file sizes that need to be transferred across into 'the cloud' and the fact that a lot of these services will compress our footage anyway.

3) Audio:

Processing your audio is crucial. Danny Boyle - the director of Trainspotting and Sunshine (amongst others) - has said that a large proportion of the impact of a visual medium like film is actually the sound. To test this, go and watch Jaws, The Exorcist or any of the 'Saw' movies with the sound off. The experience is a lot different. Remember this when making your home video. You'll want to clean up your dialogue, add some music and maybe a couple of sound effects. Nothing screams 'amateur' quicker than a video with very bad sound. So how can we solve this? I like to replace as much sound as possible on my videos with music or ambient noise. Unless people are talking it's not needed. It makes the video 'feel' more professional. The tool to use for this is Audacity. You can download Audicity at www.audacity.com. It's completely free and I've heard some excellent results coming out of it. (Incidentally, Danny Boyle actually made a complete Hollywood motion picture - 28 Days Later - using the Canon XL1s camcorder )

4) Video processing.

Once you've sorted out your footage and you're comfortable with where it is you'll want to do things such as 'sharpen', colour correct and maybe add those neat little black bars top and bottom to give your footage the 'widescreen' effect. VirtualDub is your tool. It's a very simple interface which creates scripts that run the footage for you. If you get clever with the scripts it will do amazing things for you.

5) Mastering

So now you should be ready with a film that has titles, sound and appropriate effects. It can be send to your output format This could be DVD if wanted. Or you could send it to Youtube or one of the other video sharing sites on the web. For DVD you might want to use DVD-Flick as a tool. It allows you to take video files from many many formats and create a DVD file from them. It even includes a burning tool to physically burn the file to a DVD after creation. One of the other key features this tool has is an ability to add additional audio tracks to your DVD. This allows you the option of creating, for example, an audio commentary to play with your DVD.

It should be noted that, although the process detailed above appears a bit drawn out, it can all be accomplished using free tools available in the internet today. It should also be noted that using the tools I have mentioned is not the only way to accomplish this. I have mentioned a number of tools by name merely as suggestions for what can be used, but if you look through this site you will see many others that can be used to accomplish the same, or similar, things.

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(The photo on this page is supplied courtesy of MK Media Productions. it is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license)

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