Do It Yourself: The Scenario You grab your trusty old VHS camera, your new mini digital or your Digital-8 and spend the day video taping you're daughter's wedding and reception. Or you take great vacation shots of your trip to Fiji and Tasmania. You get home and look at the tapes and discover that you left the camera running while you drove to the reception and you've taped 5 minutes of the back seat of the car. And the toast by Aunt Francine is seventeen minutes long and the whole family fell asleep watching it on tape. Or that great shot of the sunset in the Islands is way over exposed, and the horizon is all slanty in the shots of the ocean. And of course everyone wants a DVD or CD. And now what do you do?

The Question

If you had an excruciating pain in your head, would you go to a medical supply house, purchase a scalpel, come home and try to operate? Of course you wouldn't! You'd look to professionals for help.

Yet when it's video pain, many people consider "over the counter" remedies, going to a computer store, buying hardware and software, coming home and trying to edit their own wedding or vacation video, a business presentation or a memorial photo montage.

The ads make it sound so simple: "Edit your video in your computer and share your 'movie' with all your friends. Just like the professionals do! You can even make DVDs from your old video tapes."

If it's so easy, why do we get phone calls every week asking for our help with digital camera problems, or with getting a computer and editing software to work?

What to do?

The Answers

Before you throw up your hands in despair over long-winded Aunt Francine, or get too wrapped up in the frustrations of trying to set up a computer editing system and create DVDs, consider this suggestion and the information about computer editing that follows.

VideOccasions' suggestion, of course, is to bring in your tapes and let us work with you to turn your raw footage into a finished work. (We don't have do-it-yourself digital editing facilities because of the learning curve involved.) We'll help you organize the shots to tell a compelling story, add a title and music, even burn the finished work of art to a DVD. With more than 100 years experience between us working in the graphic, theatrical and video arts, we can help you create a work you can be really proud of.

• Still want to try editing it yourself, on your own computer? Well, then, here's what to consider:
  • You need to get the video from the tape into your computer
  • You need editing software and hardware.
  • You need to get the edited video out of your computer.
  • Not all DVDs come from BlockBuster!

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  Designed for VideOccasions by Jack Wolcott Last updated: 2/18/08