I spent the entire day (and night) yesterday editing a video. This video, which was on my camcorder, covered a span of two years. We got the camcorder a month or so before Hurricane Katrina hit, and the first shots filmed were taken after we moved to a small camp (shack) to live in while our area was put back together. The camp is all about "getting back to nature", so we did get some pretty interesting nature shots. If you aren't squeamish, you can watch along as we watched a snake fight a large fish, for example.
Anyway, I'm veering off topic. So there's all kinds of things on this camcorder, from camp nature shots to baby birthday parties, and I wanted to finally download all this stuff onto my computer, pick it all apart, and save it all as separate movies. My granddaughter's 2nd birthday party was held last week (or was that two weeks ago?), and I wanted to pull out the best parts, make a movie of it, and upload it to our new, private family site at myfamily.com.
So...I'm still a newbie at this whole video thing. I've managed to create some short videos and upload them without edits a couple of times, but I've never gone through the process of editing clips, adding titles, etc. Nor have I ever worked with anything that was more than just a few seconds long. If you have never worked with a video that's a few minutes long, then you may not realize how much space those few minutes take up. I sure didn't.
Anyway, after several hours, I finally figured out how to cut out parts, add transitions, etc. I tweaked the birthday video down to a measly 3 minutes, 45 seconds, which I considered "short". Turns out that 3 minutes, 45 seconds of video translates to a 64 MB file. Ouch. With my not-so-speedy satellite internet connection, that meant 2 hours of upload time only to find out at the end that the file got corrupted along the way. /Sigh.
There's GOT to be a better way. Actually, there very likely IS a better way, but after an accumulated hour or two of searching, I never could figure out what that way might be. If there is a better way, it needs to be promoted better. If there's not a better way, someone needs to create one.
We need easier video editing tools. We need smaller resulting file sizes. We need some video/techy guru to show us the way. Or at least show me the way. Maybe you already know the way. 😉
I want to participate more fully in the Universal search action. I just need to get past this video editing hell I found myself in yesterday.