Editing Principles of TV News

Video Transcript

"BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk about some basic editing principles. When you're editing, you need to know certain things. Most tapes have certain things on them. They have audio; they have video, and they have time code. Time code is basically the little numbers that scroll that let's you know where on the tape you are. So without further adieu, let's grab a tape and let's put it on the VTR and see what we'd get. So once the VTR has the tape inside, you move over and you'll--it allows you to look at the video. For example, right now, someone, one of our photographers, shot video from a campaign event. Well, what you would do to edit this is you would find a point on this tape where you wanted to take this video; you would make that an in-point or a starting location. Then you would find where you wanted to end the clip; you would make that an out-point or an ending location. So what you need to do is say, from where on this tape do I want to start? Let's say we want to start with this spot right here. So what I would do is I would say, this is the in-point. This is where I want to begin. And that's just the beginning point, and we'll plug that into the machine here, and then we would fast-forward to where we want to stop. Let's say we want to stop a few seconds into this picture, so we would make this an out-point or an ending location. Then we would go over to the record side which is this VTR over here. We would find us a spot on the tape where we wanted to place this and make that an end-point as well. We say, let's make this spot on this record tape where we want to put the video we just selected, and then we would look at that. This device will then go to a certain point and it would get up to speed, and it will show us the edit that we want to make. This typically takes about five seconds on this machine; some machines are a little longer or a little shorter. This one is acting up a little bit. Let's go to this point on the tape. Let's take a look at that. So what it will do is it will take the in-point to the out-point and show us how it's going to place that on this tape. And as you can see, it's appeared here. It will continue. It will continue until it gets to the point where we told it to stop, and at that point, the shot will complete itself. And if we like that edit and we're happy with it, we would then hit another button that will actually permanently put it on that tape until, of course, we record over it. At this point, we can also set our audio levels, but we'd use an audio mixer just like we do with all the other ones. And we say, this is the audio that we want to put on that tape. We could adjust those audio signals right here at the same time when we choose whether or not this is an edit we want to make."