Video editing: Not completely ignorant, but...?

Question

I've had quite a bit of on-the-job video editing experience the last few years, and can be pretty good at it when I get time to do it properly. Editing video is a new concern for my industry, and so I've been the one asked to figure out a lot of it, with only a little training from actual human beings and a whole lot of trial and error.

Now, I'm exploring some freelance possibilities that might include video editing, and I've been doing a lot of research into equipment. I can figure out what I could use, device by device, but I'm having a hard time figuring out if that's the best way to do it, or whether there are larger, consolidated systems that will be cheaper and/or more efficient.

So, can anyone here help give me a head start? Offer some advice yourself, or suggest the best sources for this info? And just to make sure I'm clear, I know what software I like (Final Cut, Photoshop), it's the hardware that I haven't got a handle on yet.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Answer 1

Well, you seem to know what you're doing, so I don't know how much I can help. And to answer your question, I don't think you'll need any additional hardware (especially with Final Cut Studio). It is true that big productions use big and expensive editing stations to cut their movies, but I don't think you'll need that. The only reason you would need it would be if you are digitizing footage from celluloid film, or if you were working with Professional Digital Cinema cameras and uncompressed footage, but most likely, you won't have to work with uncompressed footage. If so, Avid systems have optional hardware such as the Avid Nitris or Mojo systems, but they are pretty expensive.

If you are editing from miniDV or HDV, you WILL need a firewire cable, which cost $20. If you are working in HD, however, I would recommend purchasing external hard drives to store your footage. In particular, I recommend hard drives that transfer data via Firewire (USB hard drives are known to crash frequently).

I apologize if this didn't help too much, but it's hard to tell what you're exact needs will be. My guess is that you'll be fine without fancy hardware: my school shoots entirely in HD, and we do fine with the plain old firewire transfer into Final Cut  on our iMacs. We shoot mostly in HDV, but sometimes on P2 cards. I imagine it would be equally as simple capturing from Sony XDCAM camcorders too.

Well, have fun and best of luck!!!