Video Editing

Sony Vegas Pro 14 is a video editing software made in 2016 for video creators to edit and export videos. It has many tools to manipulate video and audio, and also has a seamless and smooth interface.

I used Sony Vegas to edit together multiple video clips I took on my trip to New York in my Science Olympiad Nationals tournament. I sadly won’t be able to share any of the clips or videos out of privacy of the people I was with, as I shared it only to them. I can however speak about my experience with it and what I learned about creating videos and editing that I did not know prior to even filming.

Before filming anything, I did not know anything about the video process or vlogs in general. I just wanted to record our experience on the trip so we could look back on it later. Throughout the trip I found myself having new ideas of how I could fit everything together, from having people do transitions for me or little interviews in the middle of recordings. However, many of these clips had no cohesion with each other and on some days there would be almost no footage, or too much footage. It was also pretty difficult to record the experience while also having my first priority to perform well in the tournament, so the video quality suffered from it. From the recording process, I learned that you need a plan for things like this, even if you have no idea what will happen. It’s important to think of the editing process while recording and figure out what will be the easiest to edit and cut together.

The editing process took 2 weeks to cut together clips from 5 different days. I thought it would take much less time, since most of the editing was simply cutting together clips without any fancy editing, but what I soon found out was that it was incredibly difficult to find clips that had cohesion and that could create a narrative between them. From the outside perspective, many videos are just a version of what you recorded with only bad parts taken out, however, what I found out was that even good parts would be taken out if it didn’t match the overall mood or story of what I was trying to convey. It’s like recording a nice cat at a funeral, it’s cute but that’s not what the focus should be, unless the video was about this nice cat you met at a funeral. It wasn’t a process of simply cutting and pasting in clips of whatever felt best, but clips that matched what I wanted to convey from the experience and memorable times that we made.

For my first ever experience into video creation and editing, I have to say, it was exhausting. Watching the same 3 second clip over and over to figure out which frame to cut out to match it with the previous clip or to match it to the music can really drain your energy. The amount of energy it took to fix an error that would never have been there had I took the video correctly was incredibly disproportionate to what was displayed. However, I had a lot of fun creating it and talking with friends on how I should structure it. One of them even tells me that they watch it every year to remember the events, which really means a lot to me.