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20 May Battle at the KrugerClick on this link which shows amazing footage of buffalo chasing lions from a buffalo calf. An Introducton to Video EditingI’ve decided to write up what process I use for Video Editing because a friend was asking me for advise and so I decided that it might be useful to others.
Firstly, I’ve found that you cannot do everything with one program. I don’t think that having a video editing program is enough. We now have video from a number of sources, photograph cameras, video cameras, MPEG4 cameras, webcams, mobile phones etc... You will find that you will need different tools to manage your video library.
All of us are now using a number of digital recording devices to save and share our memories. I believe it is important to organise all your digital content so that you can grab any digital content for any memory. I like the term which is becoming more common place, “digital original”. Keeping the original photograph and video files is essential because you don’t know up front what you will do to the content. You may change a photograph with Photoshop to saturate the colour and sharpen the image. What you can do with digital content is only up to your imagination and in time when more tools become available, you will be able to prepare your content in new and interesting ways. So always keep your digital originals! In fact, I’ve been capturing all our older video from Hi8 and Betamax tapes with a DVD Recorder.
When dealing with photos and video, you will most likely use a lot of disk space. But using just a hard disk is not enough to secure your memories. Hard disks fail so you should think about redundancy. Either backup onto multiple hard disks or get a Home Sever that has hard disk redundancy. I have a Buffalo TeraStation Home Server which has 4 hard disks working with each other so that if one hard disk fails, I can replace the hard disk and the system will rebuild what should be on it. If you are thinking about buying such a system, you might want to wait for the HP MediaSmart Home Server which should be released later in 2007.
Let’s start with video capture
I’ve tried many tools for capturing video, but funnily enough, the best tool I’ve found, comes free with Sony computers. DVGate Plus is a simple application that doesn’t try to be too fancy, but works extremely reliably. I have a Sony DCR-IP1 which was Sony’s smallest camcorder. Sony no longer sell them unfortunately. DVGate Plus captures each recorded scene into a separate video file. If you do not have a Sony computer, then you might have to find a capture program that works for you... Prepare the video for editing
I generally like dealing with a large raw video files. So I use DVGate Plus to aggregate all the scenes into a large single MPEG2 video file. There are many different video formats, but MPEG2 is probably the most common video file format. It is used for DVDs and digital television (like Sky). There are many tools available to process MPEG2 video files and all video editing software supports the format also. The first thing I do is convert all my video into MPEG2. If I’ve captured video from my video camera, then the raw video format used MICROMV. When I aggregate all the scenes into a single file, the video format is converted to MPEG2. If you capture video from your mobile phone, then the video format will most likely be 3GP. You want to convert this to MPEG2 also. Whatever your video is, make sure that you convert it to MPEG2. Doing this also means that the video can be played on any PC or device (at least in theory). This avoids the problem where videos can be played on one computer and not another.
The tools I use to convert video to MPEG2 are McFunSoft’s Video Solution ($29). It can convert just about anything to anything. This does simple conversions, but I often want to do more complex conversions, in which case I use TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. The great thing about TMPGEnc is that you can crop 4:3 video to widescreen 16:9. I’m doing this with all our old video because I want the video to come out nicely on widescreen televisions. TMPGEnc can do other things like saturating the colour so that the greens are greener and the browns are browner etc...
If you want to include photographs into your video production, like a small slide show in between your video scenes, then you will need to crop those also to widescreen format. Not all photos work for widescreen because it might be a large portrait shot and you’d end up cutting too much out of the photo to be meaningful. When cropping 4:3 video or photographs for widescreen, use the resolution 1050 x 576 pixels for PAL widescreen DVDs. It will be different for NTSC television systems. This BBC article A Guide to Picture Size is very good at explaining why it is 1050 x 576 pixels and not 720 x 576 pixels. This Wikipedia page on Display Resolution is also quite good.
At this point, I usually have all my video in MPEG2 format, my next step is to use VideoReDo Plus ($49). This is a great simple to use program which allows me to select the scenes I want on a frame accurate basis (from MPEG2 video). So I can select the exact start and stop of the scene. I do this until I have a logical scene, like seeing a cheetah at the zoo which may encompass many smaller recorded scenes. I then move onto the next logical scene until I’ve processed the whole video file. When I install VideoReDo, I select scene mode which means that whatever is selected, will be in the video, as opposed to out of the resulting video file.
I also use VideoReDo to export video that has been recorded onto a DVD into MPE2 files. And then use VideoReDo to edit the resulting MPEG2 files from the Hard Disk.
Making the final video file
After I have all my videos in fairly small logical scenes and all my photographs (both prepared for widescreen), I then use a main stream video editing program. I personally use Ulead MediaStudio Pro 8 (£180). I really like this software, but unfortunately, it looks like Ulead are not going to support it on Windows Vista. Another reasonable option is Adobe Premier Elements 3.0 (although I prefer something a little more comprehensive). I start a new DVD PAL widescreen project and start dragging and dropping my scene files into the video. Add transitions (like fade in and fade out) between video and photograph clips. I sometimes add a narration but usually always add music in the background. I normally change the volume of the music so that you can hear what people are saying in the video. Adding content to the video is usually the easy part and is very enjoyable to see your creation come to life to represent your memories well.
There is a temptation to include all your video. Don’t do it. Be very selective and if necessary, don’t be scared of having clips in a scene that are 1-2 seconds long. You want to keep the video moving and people to continue being interested. My last trip to Boracay I had recorded about 7 hours of video, but the DVD was just 45 minutes long.
Authoring the DVD
After you have created your video file for the DVD presentation, you will want to burn it to DVD. I use Ulead’s MovieFactory 5 Plus. This is fairly simple to use, you select the video file and choose your menu theme and any pictures you want on the DVD menu. I also suggest spending a little time making chapter bookmarks so that you can skip to scenes when played on your DVD player. When I burn my DVD, I burn it to a DVD ISO image so that I can burn the DVD at any time anywhere within a few minutes. I also keep the ISO image with the rest of my raw video and DVD project files.
Creating DVD content of your home videos is very rewarding. Go and Enjoy... 13 May The Visit to the Peak DistrictDuring the last week, my parents and I went to the Peak District (Derbyshire). This is the second time I’ve been to the Peak District and it’s reminded me how nice and refreshing it is. There are no motorways (at least where we were) and very few chain stores and outlets like McDonalds. There’s lots of country side and there’s quite a few things to do. Although that being said, depending on the activities you expect to do if you’re going, we found that 2 full days is ample. We got a cottage on a farm about 2 miles outside a small town called Bakewell. The first evening we took a walk down the river that runs through the centre of town which is quite picturesque. The next day we went to Chatsworth House which I was very impressed with. I’d say that it is better than Windsor Castle by far. The grounds are amazing and the house is just fantastic. Later in the afternoon, we took a journey to Poole’s Cavern. This is a large cave that is about a quarter of a mile deep. I never knew that the UK had such caves and I later learnt that there are quite a few caves in Derbyshire. If you go to the Peak District, I highly recommend that you go to some of them... The next day we drove around and went through the Snake Pass and round down Derwent Valley. Some nice views that are better in real life than through the lens of a camera. This visit was the first time I’ve really used my Satellite Navigation system (Tom Tom One Europe Edition) extensively and what a difference it made to the visit. We could instantly check how far a particular place of interest was and make instant decisions as to whether to go or not. The Sat Nav also took us on roads we would not normally have taken which was nice (and you know you won’t get lost). Some pics below: |
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