DIY Video: 10 User-Generated Content Tools You Can't Live Without

If you are delivering video through low-bitrate channels then you don’t need a great deal of finesse. A simple cut to transition between two clips is fine. A more finely crafted edit with dissolve and wipes will need to be done in a more expensive software application.

One benefit of simple command line-driven tools is that you can start to build automation systems and provide mechanisms for production staff to put together edit decision lists that are fed to a backend server, which assembles the clips together.

Online news services are an example of where the editing can be simple and still be very effective.

Titling and Animation
Editing and manipulating footage that you shot on a camera is the natural way of creating video. But it is not the only way to create moving images. If you can create an image by any other means and animate it to create a movie, then you can add some interesting special effects to your movies.

High-end NLE tools provide titling and captioning as a built-in feature. If you are running on a budget and need to produce some titles quickly, or perhaps create a montage from some still pictures, you may be able to simulate a rostrum camera with a presentation package such as PowerPoint or Keynote. Some might call this cheating. But if the results are usable, then why not use the software you have?

If you create the slide sequence with automatic slide changes, you can save this out as a movie using the export facilities. Even complex moving mask effects are possible if you use this technique to create an alpha channel mask in black and white. You should be able to create a movie from the presentation directly. If this doesn’t work, then save the slides individually and use something like QuickTime movie player to build them into an image sequence that can be converted into a movie format.

Stills can be created with any image editing application (such as Gimp, which is free, or Photoshop, which isn’t) or generated automatically. You can also create simple 2D animations by saving the pictures as an image sequence. Of course if you have 3D animation software available, many more effects are possible.

Visual Effects
Visual effects are only necessary if you are building a product that will be delivered at higher bit rates, such as fast broadband, IPTV, DVD, or broadcast TV.

Your NLE software supports basic effects that can be applied to the whole clip and transitions that can be used to join two clips together. These are different visual effects, and they are grouped and organized accordingly. For more complex effects and compositing tasks, you need correspondingly more expensive tools.