Introduction
This page is something I've mean to write for a while. It's a short guide to how you could shoot and edit video. I've not been doing it for long, but have certainly found it a fun thing to do in my spare time. I've included all the kit I use, it's not too expensive (the price of digital camcorders is dropping all the time) and it's perfect if you want to add more of a punch to your home videos.
Equipment Used
The camera I use is a Sony PC100E which I bought in July 2000 to record my trip to China. At the time it cost around �1300 (and that was after haggling with the staff in the Sony shop in Leeds town centre.. something they don't mind and I managed to knock off a few hundred quid!). It's now been succeeded by the PC110E, but is still a fantastic camcorder which I think delivers near-professional results for less cash.
This review at Tom's Hardware helped me make up my mind up when I was looking into which camera to buy.
Shooting
When shooting the video it's a good idea to have some shots in mind beforehand, otherwise you'll have way too much footage to trawl through. Try to think about the style of the shots you want.. if you're doing a 4 minute rapid walkthough of a holiday then you'll need short snappy shots (e.g. start zoomed in on a feature of a building and rapidly zoom out to reveal it's full splendour).
After I decided to actually edit my videos rather than just shoot hours of slow shots (3hrs of video in China which is OK, but boring to watch), I did my research by watching more TV. Instead of just watching, step back and watch how they've filmed and edited it.. use their ideas to make what you do look more professional.
There are loads of good techniques out there.. the C4 comedy Spaced has stacks of little camera tricks which are relatively easy to do yourself and really add to the feel of your video.
Editing
Once I've shot the footage I want, the camcorder plugs into a cheap FireWire card. It was a pain to configure under Windows 2000, but now works a treat - the PC can control the camcorder transfer digital video to my 40gb hard drive.
The PC I built isn't a monster (P3-600, 256Mb, 20+40Gb HD's, Win2k, Matrox G400 32Mb, 17" Iiyama Vision Pro 410), but it's fine for video editing -- it doesn't drop frames on FireWire capture and renders video relatively quickly.
To edit the video footage I got myself Adobe Premier 6. To get used to how it worked I filmed some footage around the house (it had a basic story of a burglary, moved through rooms and was only about 4 minutes long), fed it into the PC and learnt how basic features such as transitions worked. After a few hours getting to grips with Premier I had 30 seconds of video which looked half decent, especially after adding a soundtrack!
Click for a full view of the Premier desktop
There is a knack to getting the edited video looking good and in general you don't have to use any of the weird transitions such as star-wipes and 3D cubes. You don't see them used in films or TV so just use standard cuts and dissolves. There are a few exceptions.. I did a rather nifty effect where the shot moves up in the living room, through the ceiling and ends up in the bedroom.. this only required a simple cut in Premier, the rest used bits of card and Blu-Tac!
Publishing
If you're publishing to VHS then it's simply a matter of piping the video out of Premier (by pressing play) and recording it on the camcorder.. you can then play the camcorder into the video. The bit between the PC and camcorder will retain the quality because the transfer is digital, but outputting to VHS will drop the quality a bit.
Outputting to VHS is a bit boring, how about to Video-CD (VCD is a predecessor to DVD which is still big in Asia) or the web. Premier has a number of output options that enable you to output to a stack of formats.. if the one you want (like MPEG1) isn't there then you can get plugins which will fill in the gaps.
For the web, I've been using the Microsoft WMA format which is compact enough for the web at about 2mb for 4 minutes of video, but may require the end user to update Windows Media Player to allow them to see it.
The more exiting option is to create a VCD. Now this was really cool, basically you can output as MPEG-1 (possibly using a plugin or use transcoding) and use a CD burning tool such as Nero to burn the file onto a CD which has the VCD structure. VCD's will play on quite a lot of DVD players, so I just burnt my file onto a CDRW, took it downstairs and could watch it straight away.
There is now a product called VideoPack 5 by Roxio which helps you build menu systems for VCD's (and DVD's) so now you can make the VCD display a menu just like a DVD has.. from there you can choose to play your movie, flick though still pictures, etc.
Results
After experimenting with all this software you can take a holiday video, edit it down, add some music and burn it onto VCD together with still pictures. All with nice menus and stacks more credibility than rolling out a boring home video to show your mates.
If you're interested to see how mine have come out, I've included one below. I'll add more as I do them.. Rome is next in October, then Australia in December. Obviously the quality of the movie below is crap compared to how it looked before I compressed it for the web.. on TV it looks great!!
Digital Video - Shooting, Editing and Publishing 
