Video Editing Software Tips

All non-linear video editing software handles the video and audio assets you are using to create your project in a particular way. They all never actually touch the original video clips, audio clips or still images you are using.

Similarly they all never actually do anything until you are totally finished making all your decisions and creative choices.

Until you do finish the project the video editing software you choose will be creating a small file very similar to a text file that is a record of those choices you made.

This will usually be written in some sort of special code known only to your software. If you could read it it would look something like this. Start with black clip 5 seconds long, cross fade from that clip to video file 001, add sound file 009 at the 00.16 second mark, at 20.00 second mark reduce volume of audio file 009 and fade audio file 010 from 0 to 10 over three seconds…etc.

Obviously that looks nothing like it but I hope you get the idea!

One of the most confusing things to beginners is that they go to “File” (or similar) then hit the “Save” button and find they have created some kind of strange file with an extension they have never heard of. Whats more, no video player will play it! Of course the explanation is that they have not created a video file at all. They have created what is usually described as a project file.

I guess the origin of this is that somewhere in video editing software there had to be a differentiation between saving a project file so you can come back for later editing and saving your project to a totally new file of your completed project.

So just to clarify the terminology here, “saving” refers to saving a work in progress and saving the notes of what you want the program to do and all your decisions regarding the project.

“Rendering” means to take all the decisions you have made and to create a totally new video file encompassing those decisions.

How you render a file depends on what distribution method you are aiming for, what your viewing target will be. It could be DVD, upload to YouTube, attach to an email and send to a friend for viewing on computer, view on a mobile device…the list goes on and on.

So with regards to the rendering abilities of video editing software there are just a few points to make sure you check out before you decide to buy.

Video File Formats

As mentioned in the first post in this series you want to make sure that the video software you choose has the ability to render to the video file format or formats that you will be using the most. You can check here for an explanation of those various video file formats and also here for specifics on MPEG2 editing and MPEG4 editing.

Blu-Ray or DVD Disc Authoring

What you are looking for here is the ability to fully author (write and organize correctly for burning) DVDs in standard definition or in Blue-Ray if you are going for high definition playback. The program should offer about 10 to 20 preset menu templates for you to choose from that are fully customizable.

Smart Render/ Smart Encode

So now we know that rendering puts it all together and produces your final file in the format you have chosen as the viewing format.

Any of the highly compressed formats such as MPEG2 (for DVDs), MPEG4 etc invariably suffer from loss of quality when they are re-rendered or re-encoded from one format to another. This is an important point to remember. How often have you seen a video on YouTube that was almost unwatchable because of the poor quality. It doesn’t have to be that way if you understand this.

The degree of loss of quality varies but it is essential that any video editing software you choose has the ability to recognise those files it does not need to re-render and simply copy those sections resulting in the highest quality possible being retained. I’ll do some posts later on how to maintain quality for the various distribution formats but in the meantime take a look at a few video editing software packages and compare these features for yourself and your own needs.