i imported all of our wedding videos over thanksgiving. there were 3 dv tapes with about 2.5 hours of dv video. after it was imported into my computer it takes up about 31 gb of disk space. needless to say i was pretty surprised at how much space was taken up. luckily i have my new 200 gb external lacie drive to keep backups and i can swap some of the video on and off my machine when i am editing it.


i have a copy of final cut express that i purchased with my machine that i’ll be using to improve the lackluster job that our videographer did on our wedding dvd. the content itself was great, i just didn’t like the resulting dvd that he produced. after seeing the quality of the output you can get from applications like imovie, idvd, and final cut express i figured i would do it myself. one of the cool features of the final cut express products is that they are non destructive editors. much like itunes lets you create playlists, final cut lets you create edits without actually changing the original media. this allows you to play with edits, effects, and scenes without destroying any of the original raw footage. another cool thing is that final cut allows portions of your media to be “offline” while editing. for example, i have the 2.5 hours of footage broke up into 6 raw footage files. i can have 5 of those files on my external disk and 1 on the local machine i’m using to perform the edits. final cut will behave perfectly normally and will let you edit using the files you have “online” at the time. pretty cool ahe?


i’m sure i’ll have some interesting posts in the future with my lessons learned as well other useful tidbits, stay tuned for details.