How I Edited the Jay Rosen Tape
While watching the full Jay Rosen tape of the hows and whys of Newsassignment.net, I knew it would work great in small packages. But as a print guy I had not done that kind of edit. So I decided to figure it out. Of course, since I am self taught, my procedure might be totally wrong, but nonetheless the end products are adequate if not great.
So here is my how to:
- The full video produced at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is in Quicktime. To do the edits on my Windows Movie Maker I had to convert it to AVI.
- To do so, you need Quicktime 7.0 on your computer and then have to download Quicktime Pro for $30. Or, if you have more techno-expertise than I have, you could find and use free open source software that is available on the net. Even so downloading Quicktime Pro is also a bit of a hassle.
- To make the conversion from a Quicktime file to AVI , you go to the file menu on the Quicktime movie, click on export. You will get a pop-up box. Get AVI on the pull down menu and save to it.
- A word of caution: I have a brand new fairly powerful Dell Latitude D810 built for multi-media work and the conversion took up all my CPU computing power for about an hour for the more than hour long video. The Quicktime movie is 150,000 KB. The new AVI file is 900,000 KB. Indeed, it took so long that I had to call Apple, which sells Quicktime Pro, to get assurances that all was well. I might add here that the support folks at Apple were terrific.
- After the AVI was complete I moved it into the Movie Maker for editing. As you will see, the conversion was not perfect. It picked up little annoying digital dots that jump about the video. Nonetheless, for a first time edit I am happy with the results.
- How long did it take? Realizing that I needed Quicktime Pro, figuring out how to download it, learning how to use it, converting the file to AVI and then editing out 10 short videos from the longer tape took all of my Saturday, and except for a bike ride break, a shower and dinner, I do mean all of it.
