Powerful home PCs and affordable DV camcorders have made digital video editing accessible to all. Despite its affordability, many potential Speilbergs feel daunted by complex technical speak inevitably touted by professionals. Home movies can be easily be given that polished professional look to ensure your audience is a willing participant.

The process of creating your movie can be described as follows:

1. Record Footage: get out there and film - be it your holiday, kids football match or your own film. The most important thing to remember is that no matter how powerful you PC or how good your editing techniques, your film will always be restricted by the quality of your original footage. There are a variety of free guides on the web, so try some external links by searching in google for "filming techniques".

2. Capture Footage to PC: This is the process of transferring video from your Camcorder to your PC. If you've filmed using a miniDV camera, the data stored on the miniDV cassetes is simply transferred to your PC via a FireWire cable using your video editing package (Adobe Premier, Ulead Media Studio for example). For those using an older Hi8 camera, there's a little more to be done: the so called "analogue" video needs to be converted to digital. The PC converts this analogue signal fed via a S-Video connection. For more information on this process, see my guide on analogue to digital conversion. 

3. Video Editing: Once you have stored the video on your PC, you can arrange Clips on what is called a timeline using your video editing package. Known as Non-Linear Editing, digital video enables the user to quickly and easily arrange your film the way you want it. The original footage is never altered: the timeline merely points to ins and out points in the clips on your hard drive, so any changes you make can be easily undone. Once your happy with the way your movie looks, you can output the video to a suitable file format...

4. Encode to a suitable format: It's most likely that the raw footage used to build up
your movie is encoded as an uncompressed AVI file to maximise quality. If you're happy to store your film on miniDV tapes, you can simplt render the footage and send it back tou your miniDV Camcorder. However, you may wish to create a DVD, broadcast your movie over the web, or sent as an email to a friend. To do this, the movie must be encoded to a suitable file format. DVD films for example use the MPEG2 codec. Codec is simply short for compression-decompression (the video is compressed by an algorithm to reduce th file size, then decompressed for viewing). Different codecs enable different compression ratios. To see more about encoding, see my guide. 

I hope this gives the reader a better understanding of the process of digital video editing... to find out more about the equipment you'll need, see my shopping guide...