For Editing Video, iMovie Is a Cut Above
By Dale Dougherty
Ted Nelson, inventor of the term hypertext, once talked about how he carried a video camera with him, recording everything he saw and everything he did. When asked what he intended to do with all the tapes, he said he was collecting them in boxes and placing them in storage for posterity, along with his notebooks. Out into the future, he believed, some graduate student would go through these boxes and try to make sense of the raw materials from his life.
This desire to document events in our lives exhaustively is also common to parents with small children and families on vacation. It's one of the reasons we buy cameras. Like Nelson, however, we put off organizing photos and video tapes, perhaps hoping that elves might magically do the work for us. We end up with a lot of material that's really not usable to anyone else, which means we can't easily share it.
Obviously, it's easier to create and share text documents, especially via email and the Web. Yet the Internet also makes it much easier to share digital photos and even video. (Not having enough bandwidth to do so is just a temporary obstacle.) The core problem, however, is that we have to be able to edit multimedia content as easily as text.
You can accumulate lots of footage, just as you can shoot hundreds of photographs of an event. At least with photos, you can cull the bad ones and organize the good ones easily in an album. For family videos, most people record events they intend to "replay" at home. Yet, a beginning-to-end replay isn't something you (or anyone you know) generally wants to sit through.
