Modern computer technologies have transformed cinema from an art in which only a select few could try themselves into entertainment available to everyone. Now, in order to make a clip or even shoot a full-fledged film, you do not need to graduate from a directing university and have a film studio at your disposal. A home computer is enough and a little more patience and perseverance to master the necessary programs.
The most popular for amateur video editing are Windows Movie Maker and VirtualDub. To start working on your video masterpiece, first of all, you need to prepare "raw materials": a video filmed by your camera, a film or TV series, the frames from which you plan to use, music for the soundtrack, photographs and drawings, if they are also needed.
VirtualDub understands the AVI and WAV formats, so if the materials you need are presented in other formats, you will need to convert them, or opt for Windows Movie Maker. Another advantage of the latter is that it is included in the standard set of Windows programs. That is, the installation of the program is not required, it is most likely already present in the "Start, Programs, Accessories" menu.
Let's start by importing video - load the necessary video clips into the program. Let's import music in the same way. Importing images allows you to add a photo. It remains to carry out the installation.
Editing takes place on the timeline, which is, as it were, a blank slate of the future video clip. It contains video clips. For each, you can adjust the sound level, leaving the existing voice acting, or completely muffling it to replace the superimposed musical fragment. The resulting intermediate result can always be reproduced with the Play button.
Adding video and audio fragments, we continue to work on the clip. Sections can be swapped, trimmed, "soft" transitions or special effects provided. All this is described in detail in the help system of the video editor. If necessary, add a title and titles to the finished clip ("Creating titles and titles" in the action panel), and you can save the result to disk.
Getting started in VirtualDub is very similar: you also need to download the original video and audio clips. However, the job of highlighting the necessary parts of the video is slightly different here. In order to take only a part of the loaded movie, you must first mark the beginning of the desired fragment (set the slider on the play bar to the desired place, and select "EditSet start of selection"), and then similarly - its end. Each fragment should be saved into a separate AVI file, after which it will be possible, by loading one fragment, to add others to it with the "FileAdd AVI Segment" command.
Note that VirtualDub can make a clip that takes up a lot of disk space. Therefore, after editing is complete, it makes sense to compress audio and video streams ("AudioCompression" and "VideoCompression"), which will greatly reduce the size of the resulting file.
