If You are New to Making Video: Welcome!

Matt York

Publisher/Editor of Videomaker Magazine

The craft of making video is an enjoyable one. Whether video production is for you a pastime, a part-time moneymaker or a full-time occupation, I am certain that you will enjoy the experience of creating video. There are many facets to video production. Each brings its own pleasures and frustrations, and each will stretch your abilities, both technical and artistic.

Video is a wonderful communication medium that enables us to express ourselves in ways unlike other media. Television and Web video are pervasive in our society today. The chance to utilize the same medium that the great TV and film producers have used to reach the masses is an incredible privilege. Video is powerful. Video is the closest thing to being there. For conveying information, there is no medium that compares with video. It overwhelms the senses by delivering rich moving images and high-fidelity sound. Having grown up with TV, many of us lack the appreciation for its power. Compared with radio or print, television profoundly enhances the message being conveyed. For example, reading about a battlefield in war can be less powerful than hearing a live radio report from a journalist with sounds of gunfire, tanks, rockets, incoming artillery fire and the emotions from an anguished reporter’s voice. Neither compares with video shot on a battlefield.

It is amazing that you can walk into a retail store, make a few purchases in a few minutes and walk out with all of the essential tools for producing video. For less than $500, you can buy a camcorder and a personal computer and suddenly you have the capacity to create video that rivals a television station. Your mobile phone might work just as well for making simple videos. The image and sound quality of a camcorder or a mobile phone is better than broadcast television as viewed on an average TV. The transitions and special effects, available with any low-cost video editing software package, exceed the extravagance of those used on the nightly news.

If you want to share your videos on the internet, all you need is a Web-enabled mobile phone and you can upload directly to one of the many video-sharing sites. Realistically, if you are reading this you have a greater commitment to excellent video, which can only be accomplished with a dedicated camcorder and video editing. While many of the videos on these video-sharing sites are of low quality, there are plenty of people uploading and sharing some wonderfully produced videos. Video sharing is a wonderful new way to reach anyone on the planet that has an internet connection.

There was a time when any message conveyed on a TV screen was perceived as far more credible than if it were conveyed by other media (i.e. print or audio cassette). While that may no longer be as true, video messages are still more convincing to many people.

Once a highly complex pursuit, video editing is now just another software application on a personal computer. We all realize that simply using video editing software doesn’t make someone a good TV producer any more than using Microsoft Word makes one a good writer. However, the ability to edit video in your own home or office is so convenient that it enables more people to spend more time developing their skills.

One of the most rewarding experiences in video production is getting an audience to understand your vision. The time between the initial manifestation of your vision and the first screening of the video may be just a few days or several years, but there is no more satisfying (or nerve-wracking) feeling than witnessing an audience’s first reaction to your work.