Cutting, Chunking & Converting: The Three Cs of Video Editing

If you've ever watched one of our YouTube movies, you're probably wondering how we feed our channel with such riveting and regular content. Almost every week we interview a faculty member about his or her latest compelling research on social entrepreneurship, emotional buying or word-of-mouth advertising. Then the production team, usually Dean and Melanie, hand off the digital camera to me--the video editor.

First I fire up the 17-inch MacBook Pro, a sleek silver goddess among laptops that I use to edit Leeds videos. I plug the Flip or AVCHD cam into the data port and drag the raw video files onto the hard drive. I double click on Final Cut Pro, the same video editing software used in Hollywood filmmaking, and import this new mysterious media.  A horizontal strip of tape, the timeline, appears along the bottom, with several preview windows and tool palates filling the rest of the screen. I drag the new media into the timeline and squirm in anticipation as it renders.

15 minutes...

 7 minutes...

19 seconds...

Render successful! Time to edit. I hit "B" to activate the blade tool, which I use to cut the video into chunks, kind of like hitting return on the keyboard.  Once I've found the natural flow of the story, I start rearranging chunks, just like dragging and dropping sentence fragments in Microsoft Word.  I snip tangents here and there but micro-edit as little as possible. Then I slap some transitions in between the cuts and add some captions and text slides to make it as seamless as possible.  By now our videography is so slick that I hardly need to adjust coloring (which negates the unkind glow of fluorescent lighting).

Then I submit my story to the "deflavorizing" process, where we take out anything that sounds kitschy, confusing or off-color. We watch the short video several times with a hypercritical eye. Are there any dropped frames? Does that anecdote make sense? Should we edit out her laugh or keep it?

Now all I have to do is hit File<Export<Quicktime Conversion and voila-- I've made another movie! Go check it out at youtube.com/ColoradoLeeds.

Posted by Molly Rettig.