How To Stitch Together Video Clips into Short Movies

Often, the difference between an interesting home movie and one that's intolerable is editing. This applies to the video you capture with your digital camera as well. Chances are your digicam came bundled with software to help you edit your movies. If it didn't, or if you don't like that software, you can use QuickTime Pro and just a few simple commands to transform your video clips into short movies.
Many digital media fans are already familiar with QuickTime. The free player is available for Windows and Macintosh computers, and chances are you already have it on yours. If so, you can use it to watch the video snippets you capture with your digital camera.
You can purchase a registration key for $30 from the Quick-Time web site (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/) that unlocks a number of additional powerful features, including:

Editing tools

You can trim off excess footage, combine clips together, add soundtracks, and create titles for your movies.

Full-screen playback

You can turn your computer into a movie theater that presents your videos in full-screen mode with a black background. It's very impressive.

Additional audio and video controls

You can fine-tune playback by adjusting brightness, treble, and bass using the advanced controls.
I'm going to introduce you to two powerful editing techniques in QuickTime Pro. First you'll learn how to trim your snippets to cut off excess footage you don't need. Then you'll use the Select, Copy, and Add commands to combine your video clips into short movies. Here's how it works:

1. Upload all of your video snippets from your digital camera, and then open the two clips that you'd like to combine into one short movie by double-clicking on their file icons or by using the Open command in QuickTime. Place them side by side.
2. Use the Trim command to snip off any unwanted footage at either end of your movie. Simply move the bottom triangles on the scrubber bar to the endpoints of the content you want to keep. The gray area will be kept, and the white area on the scrubber bar will be trimmed away. To make this happen, go to the Edit drop-down menu and select Trim. Repeat this process for both clips.
3. Now use Select, Copy, and Add to combine these short clips into a longer presentation. The procedure is similar to copying and pasting in a text document, but with a slight twist. Start by going to your first snippet and clicking on the far-right control button to move the scrubber head to the end of the clip. (You could manually drag the scrubber head there, but this way is faster.)

Next, click on the second movie once to bring it forward. You're going to copy the content of this snippet and add it to the window on the left. Open the Edit drop-down menu and choose Select All, and then open the menu again and select Copy. That will put the selected video and audio on the clipboard.
Finally, click on the first window once to bring it forward, and choose Add from the Edit drop-down menu. The video you previously copied to the clipboard will be added to the end of your first snippet. Notice how the time designation has changed to reflect the addition of the second snippet .
Remember that I mentioned this procedure is like copying and pasting text, but with a twist? You could use the Paste command here, too, but doing so would replace the video in the lefthand window, instead of adding to it. That's the twist in QuickTime Pro.
If you want to combine more than two clips, you can keep adding snippets as described above until you have a complete movie. Always work from the beginning of the movie to the end, adding video clip after video clip, and be sure to trim your snippets before adding them to the movie.
Once you've combined your clips into one movie, go to the File menu and select Save As. Give your movie a new name, click the "Make movie self-contained" radio button, and then click the Save button. You now have a complete movie.
These simple editing maneuvers allow you to combine as many snippets as you want to build home movies. Keep in mind that you should use the same pixel dimensions, such as 320 x 240, for all of the clips that you'll use to create the final presentation. Otherwise, parts of your movie won't look right.
Regardless of which platform you create your movies on (Mac OS or Windows), they will play equally well on both Macs and PCs. You can also post your movies on your personal web site, to share with friends and family all over the world.