Beginners Guide to PC Video Editing

If you're new to PC video editing then knowing where to start can be a bit 'daunting, so hopefully this guide will point you in the right direction.

For starters you'll need some items of equipment

Camcorders / Video Decks

Depending on your needs or aims there are number of solutions to be discussed, so I split them into separate sections.

1. If you start from New then I recommend purchasing a new digital camera, this will give you superior video and sound quality as well start making video editing much easier, so ideal for the beginner. There are thousands to choose from catering for various types of budgets.

2. You may already have an old deck or video camera that uses traditional analog outputs such as composite or s-video (be sure to check first, what you have exits).
For this type of configuration you would need a capture card / analog-digital converter, this is discussed in more detail later in this article.

A PC for video editing

E 'can now easily capture video from digital camcorder directly to your PC and edit it.
If looking to buy a new PC or build a new one, then the current specifications are more than powerful enough, a typical spec PC these days is a P4, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Windows XP or something.
You can always use your existing PC if you have one, but would not recommend using anything below a PIII 600.

Additional hardware

When transferring video from camcorder to PC, there are a number of additional things to consider depending on the type of camera you use.

If you're using a digital camera, so all you need is a firewire card (also known as a card IEE1394), a lot of current PC's have these standards now, otherwise you will need to buy the card separately. Some of these will be bundled with editing software like Adobe Premiere, but this really depends on which card you buy and how much is spent, once the camcorder is connected to your firewire port Windows will automatically recognize the camcorder.

If your using the old analog camcorder then you will also need an analog to digital converter, see the section on video editing cards below.

Speed?

It is worth considering the speed of the PC processor, the speed will affect the rate will encode your video, in which encoding your DV video clips are converted to a more compressed format such as DVD's are encoded in MPEG2. So the faster the better really. Also consider the amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb would be the minimum.

Extra Hard Drive

Its value considering having an extra drive dedicated for video, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GB of hard drive space in order to consider a large-capacity hard disk such as a 80GB or 120GB, also consider the number of revolutions disk, at least 7200RPM would be recommended.
If your PC supports it (most new to do now), and a Serial ATA (SATA) drives offer higher data transfer rates up to 150MB/sec compared to 100 or 133 offered by the IDE, you can also consider a SCSI drive if you have a PC Card SCSI standard.

DVD / CD Burners

If you are going to put your film on CD-ROM (VCD), then a DVD or CDRW and DVDRW is an essential element of the kit, newer PCs can have a CDRW and DVDRW as standard, to burn the DVD, you need DVD authoring software.

Video Editing Cards

If you have and older analog camcorder / deck then an analogue USB or PCI capture cards will suffice.

These dedicated analog to digital converters, to keep the conversion process from the CPU and then accelerates up transfer.

If the trouble to get a capture card quality as cheaper cards can produce conflicting results,

The video editing software

Here is where all the creative work starts and the creative work starts, you can capture video from your camcorder, edit the captured clips, arrange them in a sequence, add transitions, titles and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready to re-export the movie camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD, VCD, etc.) .......