NotebookReview.com by Dustin Sklavos

My job here as a writer for NotebookReview is to distill complicated information into something that the average consumer can understand. Most things computer-related have some kind of basic analogy anyone can grasp, but video editing is wholly its own entity. The basic workflow is simple and logical to me because I've been doing it for nearly a decade now. How do you quickly convey it to someone who's completely new at it?

As I said last week, consumer grade video editors don't solve this problem at all. If anything, they complicate it, because instead of just simplifying the workflow of professional grade software, they create their own disciplines and languages. If you want to take that knowledge and apply it to something more powerful and flexible, you're out of luck. Ironically, the more powerful software is in many ways less complicated because it doesn't take these workflow shortcuts.

In this second part of my video editing series, I'll walk you through the basic elements found in professional video software. When I started to learn the software -- in my case, Adobe Premiere -- I found the interface to be very intimidating. But later, when I went off to university proper, I had to learn Final Cut Pro and was pleased to discover that it was in many ways basically interchangeable with Premiere. What I learned with Premiere could be easily applied to Final Cut Pro, and vice versa. Professors even said as much. My ultimate goal here is less to tell you exactly how to use this software as it is to give you a baseline to work from, an understanding of what you're looking at so that you won't feel intimidated but instead ready to learn how to use these powerful new tools. read more...