TIPS – Working with video clips

If you’re planning to import video clips into your digital composition project, make sure you have access to the highest quality version of the video clip, saved in a format that your composing tool will accept.

Lots of factors impact video quality, including the rate of “frames per second” used to record the original, the original aspect ratio, and the compression routine used to export the clip. You don’t need to understand the technical details, but you do need to be aware that compiling different types of video will most likely lead to a loss of the kind of quality you might prefer, although that’s something viewers of remixes are already familiar with, so it won’t necessarily reduce the rhetorical impact of your video.

Video clips also come in an even wider variety of formats than images, so you’ll need to give yourself time to look into what formats your composing tool will accept and how to convert files that are not in one of those formats into an acceptable format, as needed.