Press release November 2002

Video editing on a computer was the subject of the November meeting of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers. As the majority of members had not yet tackled using a computer for this purpose, the club invited Pinnacle, one of the leading manufactures of such systems, to come along and show what could be achieved. The audience were enthralled to see just how easy it seemed to be to go from camcorder to a polished film. Pinnacle demonstrated two types of software starting from what it called the very cheap at £59 to the very expensive at many hundreds of pounds. With the ‘cheap’ software the camcorder only had to be connected to the computer, then with a few flicks on the keyboard, the computer took a copy of the camera tape and stored it. Then, once the computer had stored all the precious video, it displayed it all on screen as a series of little pictures, each representing one of the captured clips. Editing this into a film was shown to be a simple matter of dragging these images around on the screen to get the right order in the film, chopping out the poor shots and then adding a title. The results were very impressive and certainly looked very professional. The finished film can be written out to VHS tape, DVD or any other standard medium or format. From the questions flowing from the audience, it was clear that many members were genuinely impressed and were considering using the approach.

The second demonstration was of the very expensive system. Somewhat surprisingly, the look and feel was very similar to the first demonstration, with the extra cost going mainly on the much more fancy effects that it could produce. Seemingly one could adjust the colour, focus, size, speed or virtually anything one wanted with this upmarket software which was marketed as being very similar to that used by commercial television.

A feature of the club is the high level of training opportunities provided for its members, and this evening was no exception with five new training sessions being announced. These were eagerly taken up, with so many members wanting elementary editing that an extra session is going to have to be put on.

The club meets in St. Martins Church Hall, Dene Lane, Lower Bourne, Farnham at 7.30 p.m. on the first Friday of each month. The next meeting on 6^th December will be a competition evening with members showing their short films as they battle to win cup and shield trophies.