Apple Training Series: iLife 06

For this part of the lesson, close the iMovie project you created to import your clips. You're going to use material Christopher and Jennifer have shot to explore principles of shooting and editing.

The bits of video you need for movie editing are called coverage. You need a certain minimum of coverage to have video elements you can edit. There is also such a thing as too much coveragedozens of shots from dozens of angles. It can be too much to manage and makes for hard-to-watch videos. Simple shooting not only makes sense, but it's also pretty much the most professional approach to a video project. In this lesson, you'll witness the minimum of necessary coverage and see how potent it is for editing.

She used her camcorder with good technique. She framed shots with nice composition in mind. She followed good videography rulesshe held the camera steady and didn't use the zoom (much). But the shots are little more than moving stills. Each is nice, but few have any relationship to each other. And while they might be assembled in some clever way to give you the feeling of being in the studio (with the sound adding an important element), they're not the right pieces for editing.

The problem with Jennifer's video is that she had no agenda when she shot it. She just pointed the camera at whatever interested her. So what she ended up with is a slideshow of moving pictures. You'll need to go further and gather specific kinds of shots, shots that will go together neatly when you edit the video.

The secret, then, of making videos good and creating them easily does not lie in knowing how to edit, and it doesn't lie in good videography. The secret is in shooting holistically, which means always keeping the eventual editing in mind.

In Hollywood, a scene is set up, and the director shoots it a number of times from a number of angles. By having different shots of the same subjects doing the same things, an editor can assemble that material in ways that have great impact. It doesn't take too many shots to get the material you need to do this. And you don't need to have actors with scripts. Almost any event in the real world has a natural kind of repetitiveness to it, and you can leverage this by moving decisively into specific positions, gathering up the bits of coverage you need to make the video.