Cutting Up Those Shots
There is no right way to edit a scene or a sequence or even a whole film or video; there are only bad ways, good ways and better ways. What we’re going to do in this lesson is to look at some video and edit it. I’m going to give you a number of different ways of working with it, and a few different ways to cut it up, call it Slice and Dice.
There are basically two strategies for cutting long pieces of video. The first is to create short clips while leaving the whole material intact in each clip. I call this the Slice method. The second is to make subclips, which divide the master clip into shorter sections, each only the length of the selection. We’ll call this the Dice or Subclip method. They both have advantages and disadvantages. It’s important to understand the distinction between different types of clips. First there is the source media, the actual digital material on your hard drive. It may be a whole reel of tape, or it may be shorter sections, either way this is the master clip for your video. It contains every frame of the source media available to you. A Sliced clip is the same as the master clip it’s taken from, except that a start point and an end point are defined for a particular shot. In a Diced clip not only are the start and end points defined, but the media that’s useable by the clip is limited and does not have all the media in the original.
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