At that rate, home users will fill 14GB with the 60 minutes of film stored on a single digital videocassette. The quality with Movie Maker is not as good, of course, as an AVI file or some other format. But when you squeeze down something as much as that, you expect to give up something. As the data stream into the home computer, users can mark rough cuts and points where they might add fade-ins, swirls, ripples, titles, audio and other effects. Most novices become so entranced with these magical abilities that their first productions become a gimmicky, nauseating tour d' force.
Experts recommend using short bursts of video and sparing use of effects.
The editor marks those changes for the user, indicating a change in scenes or that the photographer has jerked the camera around too fast. Editing with these novice tools isn't quick. In general, the process takes about two hours for each hour of tape. More ambitious projects true home masterpieces may require 10 hours or more. For professionals such as Mr. Walker who jumped into the digital realm for the first time this year with the purchase of Final Cut Pro software and a Macintosh G4 the arrival of desktop editing is nothing short of a miracle.