"I could quickly video in a book.
Then go to any page and start the playback in slow motion."
---What you're doing is editing. Non-destructive and non-perminant editing. When you fast-foward through commercials when you record a TV show to watch it later, you are editing the content to your personal taste at that moment.
"At a recent town hall forum. (a week ago)
I videoed it all and distributed the video, the next day.
They would have been more ****ed at me, if I chose to
edit something out."
That is something COMPLETELY different. That is a documentation of an event, where all information is important. The video is not there for quality and watchable-qualities, it is there to document what happened. Maybe audio editing would be necessary, if the sound-feed sucked - just to make everything clear and easily heard (the point of documenting a town-hall meeting)
THIS paragraph made me do a double-take:
"Another thing, I suggest that would have Edit gurus
gasping and sucking the walls in is:
If I want to send a small segment of the video on the net.
I'll display it on my Flatscreen and video that in.
It's very quick to do.
I don't need any editing software. (or the learning curve)
It reduces the resolution.
(that's ok if you want to keep the original to yourself)
(also there is far more loss of resolution, when I transfer my
mpeg video to the site. So any loss by re-shooting, goes almost
unnoticed.)"
Take a picture.
Photocopy it.
Photocopy the photocopy.
Keep doing that.
Quality decreases if you copy the copy. The master is always the absolute best quality. The file is the original. The video playing on your screen is a reproduction of the data that makes up the original, thus being a copy. You are copying a copy by video-taping the reproduction play-back. Not only that, but your screen refreshes at a certain frequency, and that is undoubtedly NOT sync'd with your video camera's frame-rate. I can assure you, that you simply do not notice the quality drop. It is more efficient, and quicker if you're familiar with your own software, if you simply edit your video down to what segment you want, then upload it to a web-site. Oh, and by the way - you're doing destructive editing here. You're editing your footage down to a smaller segment of time at your choice. ****, just shooting video in itself is editing. You don't get the whole picture - you choose what to shoot and what not to shoot. Video and photography are NOT truthful forms of communication, as you edit upon capturing the image.
I do agree that if you're out shooting and getting more footage, that you'll get much more good-footage. However, you're comparing yourself to people who are working for news channels - they are supposed to get maybe 5 minutes worth of video, take it back to the station, edit it to their time-segment, and go out and shoot the next story. The 10pm news has to cover MUCH more than one press conference, so it makes no sense to shoot 3 hours of footage and sift through it to get the 3-5 minutes they need, or shoot for one-hour and just show that one press conference. As a personal user - you should be shooting as much as you can regardless - same concept: you get more good, usable footage. However, you set aside different time-periods to edit down the terrible, unusable, boring parts of your footage, to come up with a watchable segment of video that requires no extra work by the viewer (fast-fowarding / slow-mo).
Most of the people on forums like that do video for practical purposes or as an art-form. Like I said, unedited video has virtually no place in commercial television, mor any commercial setting for that matter. Video for them has to be stream-lined, interesting, fast-moving, and informative in a short-period of time - something un-edited video simply cannot do.
As an art-form, the video has to be well-throught out, scrutinized over (image quality, movement, etc etc.). Un-edited video has a small niche in the art-world (Andy Warhol's portraits), but most of the time they would look TERRIBLE, out of place, and wouldn't flow as the artist wants.
Your unedited video is great for documentation purposes, but not for commercial or artistic purposes. Editing has a HUGE place in video - so THAT'S why video editing should be done. I'm not saying you as an individual should edit your video, but I am simply contradicting your general statement about all video editing.
