Homemade Video Editing Special Effects

The widespread availability of digital camcorders and basic video editing software programs, such as Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie, make it possible for average people to create video clips with a variety of special effects. While advanced effects such as computer graphics require advanced knowledge, basic special effects are often easy to implement using the tools in video editing software.

Stop Motion

Stop motion is a popular video effect that gives a flip-book or clay-animation quality to a video. To create a stop-motion effect in a video, you must align a series of still images in a video editing program. Each image should be displayed for less than a second but substantially longer than a single frame in a standard video. You can create stop-motion videos either by using a normal camera to take still images and then aligning the images or by taking a video, cutting out individual frames from the video and then aligning those frames. Stop motion can be a labor-intensive process.

Play Speed and Reverse Direction

Another common video effect that is available in many video editing programs is altering the speed of a video. Slow motion and fast motion help highlight certain parts of a video clip or get a video to flow more naturally if certain scenes are too fast or slow when played in real time. Changing play speed can be a subtle or easily noticeable effect. Reversing the direction of a video is another simple special effect. You can reverse a video to make it appear that people are walking or running backward or catching objects that seem to fly up from the ground (objects that were thrown in the original clip before it was reversed).

Titles

Titles are a basic video editing effect that allows you to add descriptive frames to the beginning, end or middle of a video. You can use title slides for many purposes, such as displaying the title of a video, dividing a video into parts or chapters and displaying credits at the end of a video.

Transition Effects

Transition effects are special effects that allow one video clip to move on to another clip in a way other than simply jumping right to a different frame. For example, a basic transition effect is to have one video clip fade out while the other clip fades in. This can create a less jarring transition from one screen to another. However, transition effects can appear amateurish if used in a way that draws too much attention to them.

References

• CyberCollege: Video Editing - Continuity Techniques
• The Guardian: Special Effects