How I learned Basic Video Editing In 1 Hour

So in my engineering 123 class we have a group project.  We are assigned groups of 6 people and are asked to build a Rube Goldberg Machine on a given theme.  In our case the theme was spider-Man.  The construction went pretty well but that's not what I'm going to talk about.  so get graded on the project we had to hand in a video of the machine working.  Then for the presentation we show the same video but we can add music, credits, etc.  Being the more tech savvy person of my group I decide I will edit the video.

At that point I had zero experience with video editing, so I started with the most basic of all learning experiences, I googled "Video editing".  Within a few minutes I had picked out the free program I would use to do this, I used VideoPad by NCH software.

http://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/index.html

At first glance it looked fairly complicated with all the options of what to do:

But after getting a chance to read everything it became more clear.

1. add media

2. drag media to "sequence" area under the windows

3. start cutting

It was also easy to add music to the video by dragging the music file to the bar under the sequence bar, right were it says "add your sound clips here"  and you can just click and drag the bar to have the music start where you want.

One nice thing about this program is that you can save the video into a lot of formats, I just used .mp4 but its nice to have options.