Reduction Video Editing is about reducing perhaps 10 hours of film to one hour or less. Watching ten hours of film is, of course, possible, but it is nice to have a shorter version that can be watched easily.
Summarize ten hours of film in less than one hour
Reduction editing is about time-slicing to remove the poorer quality source and reduce the length of scenes. Often it is a question of focusing on people, not leaving anyone out, without slash and burn, taking care to maintain a coherent and agreeable film to watch. It might be about keeping each place visited on holiday, but reducing the time spent in each.
It might also be about making a more dynamic souvenir: the shot of the church may only need 7 seconds, not 3 minutes. Determine the approach that you would like to take.
Scope of reduction video editing
Reduction editing is often appropriate after transfer, particularly of magnetic tapes often filmed long. VHS, Hi8 and DV are formats where people often filmed long sequences.
Perhaps you filmed Christmas, the birth of your eldest, family meals which lasted a long time, the wedding and party which lasted two days.
Reduction video editing is about creating a valuable event or holiday souvenir, sometimes even summaries of whole lives.
You can edit multiple long sources mixing DV, VHS and Hi8 sources together or where different people have filmed the same event on different cameras.
Differences with other types of editing
- Reduction video editing is about reducing a long source to a shorter final edit (between 1 and 60 minutes)
- It is not a photo montage (stringing photos together) which is about assembling and possibly animating photos, adding music and sometimes text commentary as subtitles.
This is not a compilation edit, which is about stringing together video. For instance, we compiled the work of John Fogerty for their fan club, assembling choice recordings from the artist’s long career, to create several themed DVDs.
Reduction video editing is about linear editing, not so much about about special effects.
Editing recording of plays
Editing for the recording of a play is not strictly a reduction video edit. The default approach to editing a theatre recording is generally to retain the full length and swap between best multi-cam shots. But one must still choose which of the best shot to retain.
However, use a reduction video edit to create a teaser or summary of the play.
Reduction video edits for weddings
A wedding edit is a typical reduction video edit because it may last up to two days including the religious service, the town hall, the meal and party afterwards and possibly people may come back the next day. The final result is much shorter, generally 10 to 1. The most appropriate edit for a wedding is generally to create a one-hour souvenir edit to create a great souvenir of your wedding. The final result is a summary or souvenir edit.
Editing the Film of Your Child’s Baptism
A baptism edit may often just be the religious service, but may also include a meal and a party afterwards. A reduction video edit is a good solution to manage many hours of tape reduced to a great one-hour souvenir. Use a reduction video edit on footage of a party (souvenir, 1 hr).
A Teaser (1 minute)
Create a teaser by cutting into scenes, selecting and marking the best bits and cut together into a short film lasting 1 minute. Where a summary edit aims to retain significant and representative content, whereas the teaser can only show flashes and cannot summarize in the same way.
Design a teaser to attract attention, to make the public want to watch the full-length film. A ‘real’ teaser is filmed intentionally. A teaser after transfer is rare.
A Souvenir Edit (1 hour)
Obviously, fewer choices are involved in a one-hour souvenir edit than in a ten-minute summary edit or teaser. However, the objective is different. A summary edit aims to compile the best key moments and be representative of the whole story. It is therefore important to retain the best sequences.
A summary edit can be offered as a birthday present. We have already built a one-hour souvenir edit which summarizes eighteen years of life and fifteen hours of tape in one hour. The approach is really to select the most important moments.
A Summary Edit (10 minutes)
If you have ten hours of analogue or digital tape, and you would like a summary or souvenir edit, here’s what we will do:
First, we will compile everything into one digital stream or on a series of DVDs and get you to watch it all. We ask you to watch everything, to note all the important and less important bits. You could note all the important passages on a grid.
Once we have understood what you want to achieve, we cut your film and export it for comment. It can go back into editing a second or third time due to omissions or if the storyline doesn’t hold together.
We then go through your notes together, look at what is important for you and discuss your objectives. We sit down to discuss your objectives and our recommendations.
Once you are happy, we burn the edit to DVD, YouTube, hard disk or key according to your needs.