May 2007 — News
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Know Your NLEs
More and more schools across the country are bringing digital media into the curriculum--from digital painting and graphic arts to digital print production to digital video editing. In particular, there seems to be a surge of activity in the digital video editing space, with schools offering courses designed as either electives to fulfill an art requirement or as prep for students looking to pursue careers in production and post-production.
Judging anecdotally from the letters I receive, there seems to be a whole lot of confusion surrounding the hardware and software involved in video editing. Educators make recommendations to IT people for equipment; IT people come back with different ideas; and between the two--somewhat understandably--there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of expertise involved in the decision-making process.
Setting aside the merits of incorporating digital video editing into students' educations, which I happen to support, I'd like to walk you through some of the technical and decision-making difficulties that have been voiced to me. As a person who is involved in technology choices for your school or district, you will be faced with some of these difficulties as digital video editing continues to gain in popularity.
We'll start off with a look at the software available--both the free applications and the editing apps hat make more sense for career- and college-oriented video editing education programs. In the next installment in this two-part series, we'll try to make some sense of the hardware options available out there.
System Breakdown
Non-linear editors (NLEs), also known as video editing applications, come in three varieties: professional, semi-professional, and consumer.
Consumer (Freebie) NLEs
Consumer NLEs are generally free or very cheap and include programs like iMovie from Apple (free on all recent Macs) and Microsoft Movie Maker. For video editing projects, they can get the job done. In fact, Apple's iMovie can even get the job done on high-definition (HD) video projects. These free and cheap solutions are ideal companions to courses that involve multimedia projects beyond PowerPoint. (A science class project, for example, might include an edited video of a field trip.)
These programs can also serve as somewhat acceptable solutions to help introduce students to video editing concepts.
However, they're also dead ends in the sense that the particulars of these programs do not apply to NLEs that students will use in college or professionally. Yes, students can benefit from learning the art of video editing through these programs, but experience with Movie Maker isn't exactly something that a kid can put on a resume. And the way those editors work is not the way professional systems work. (To use an analogy, it's about as valuable as teaching students wireless networking using a Linksys Wireless-G. Yes, they might get a little something out of it, including learning how to deal with the frustration of poorly conceived networking devices; but, no, as a whole, it doesn't apply to the professional world.)
