Move over, Spielberg - part XIV

Very little progress since the last post - I've been trying to write the narration script but got tied up with other things over the weekend and didn't find time where I could sit down and focus. I'm going to make a point of doing that this evening, even if I only get part of it done.

I've been thinking about dropping in some of the unused footage as overlays in a few places to make some of the longer sequences a little more interesting. I think there are one or two other things I can do that would improve the film quite a bit with just a few minutes work, too.

Move over, Spielberg - part XIII

I have the opening titles, the end credits and all but one of the caption texts in place (I missed one by mistake) and I've also positioned the stills for the end credits, the production logo, and some music. Not bad going; all that's left is the narration and the rest of the backing music.

I'm really hoping to get finished no later than Sunday so that I can upload it on Monday. Unless I run into a serious problem it's looking like I have every chance of doing that.

Move over, Spielberg - part XII

The timeline editing is complete, or as complete as it's going to be for the moment - the only changes that might be needed from this point are to help fit the narration to the action better.

The next step will be to add text overlays, an opening title and the end credits. I've also created a "boilerplate" production logo that'll be going at the very end of the documentary - the last thing before it fades to black. After all the text elements are in place, the final steps will be the narration track and the background music.

Move over, Spielberg - part XI

I've almost completed the timeline editing - in fact it would have been finished last night except that the original ending I had in mind came across as too clichéd and boring, so I'm rethinking that part. I expect to be able to get it mostly the way I want it this evening.

The next step after that will be to lay down the narration voice track, which presents its own set of problems; for one thing I'm not certain that the mike connected to my computer is actually working. When I tried to use it a couple of weeks ago the recorded sound was so quiet on playback I could barely hear it. I need to test it and maybe make some adjustments, but even if I can get it working perfectly I don't think I'm going to be able to use it to record the narration track.

One thing you don't really appreciate until you've played back the sound from a camcorder or some similar device, is just how difficult it is to record something without distracting and unwanted background sounds. You may think while you're recording that your sound is good, but when you play it back you'll notice all kinds of things that your ears tuned out. In my case I just know that if I record on the computer I'll pick up the sound of the computer's cooling fans, maybe the sounds from the TV in the next room, sounds from outside the house coming in through the window, and so on.

As it happens I have a Sony ICD-SX25 digital voice recorder - it records in stereo and has a USB connector so you can connect it to a computer and transfer the recorded sounds as WAV files (or MP3, Ogg Vorbis and others). I'm thinking that if I can take my narration script and the recorder to some place where I can control the background sounds, I can record my sound track that way. It'd be a bit awkward because I won't be able to read the script out while watching the video playback for timing, but I think I can make it work. All I have to do is think of somewhere quiet to do that...

Move over, Spielberg - part X

It's aliiiive!

I just installed the new FireWire card and USB modem that I bought yesterday evening. It was a snap to do - no drivers to install because XP has them already built in (note to self: make sure the FireWire drivers are up-to-date). The USB modem is giving me better connection speeds than the old Lucent PCI job did (over 50kbps the first time I tried it). I tested the FireWire by taping two 15-second fragments of video then plugging the camcorder into the FireWire card. Vegas captured the video and automatically split it into clips - no muss, no fuss. Muahahahahahah!

Now, back to editing.

Move over, Spielberg - part IX

We went shopping last night, mostly for Thanksgiving food, so I didn't do any work on the video. This evening isn't looking good either because I have some other stuff to take care of first, and tomorrow is likely to be taken up with getting stuff ready for Thanksgiving. I may be able to squeeze a few minutes in here and there but that's likely to be about it until Friday. Since there's not likely to be much happening this may be the last post for a couple of days.

On the upside, I did find a solution to the FireWire problem: I bought a USB modem, so now I can pull out the PCI modem and use that slot for a FireWire card. I also found a 3-port FireWire card for $30 that came with a cable included in the box (most of the cards I've seen don't include the cable, which cost anything from $20 to $40 to buy separately). I'll probably install that lot over the weekend.

Move over, Spielberg - part VIII

I've got about half of the clips arranged on the timeline so far and done some shuffling around to get the clips into a sequence that looks good. Getting things the way I want is quite time-consuming but I reckon another couple of hours should see it to the point where all of the A-reel footage is in place and in sequence, then I want to drop in a few stills that'll be used as backrounds for text overlays. After that I can start dropping in some of the B-reel overlays.

I haven't had time to go a-hunting for a PCI expansion chassis yet. Fry's can't help and unfortunately that doesn't leave many places left to try round here; Micro Center may be the best bet, but if they don't have anything I don't know what else to try.

Move over, Spielberg - part VII

As I was playing back video clips I realized that the sound is a little bit out of sync with the video - it lags behind by a few frames. It's not a problem for the documentary project because it's only noticable a small number of the clips, for example when someone is speaking in shot so that you can see the lip movements don't match the sounds. I can fix it where necessary by "sliding" the audio track three or four frames to the left relative to the video track. I don't want this to be a long-term problem, though.

It turns out that the sync problem is a side-effect of capturing using USB - yet another reason to get FireWire, which in turn means finding a PCI expansion chassis to put it in... but so far, I've had no luck in finding one locally. I'd rather not buy one online - I need to be able to ask some questions about compatibility and data rates before I decide which one to get - but if that's the only way I can get hold of one, I guess I won't have a choice.

On the production front the storyboarding is coming along nicely and I may be able to start ordering the clips on the timeline and maybe even positioning some of the b-reel overlays today and tomorrow.

Move over, Spielberg - part VI

10:30pm - just finished pulling out the useful footage into the project media and sorting the clips into categories.

The next step will be to finish the storyboard planning and once that's done I can begin editing.

Happy Belated Bloggy Birthday

I just realized that the first post to this blog was made just over a year ago... in other wirds, this blog's first birthday was November 1.

Happy Birthday, blog. :)

Move over, Spielberg - part V

I had to work later than planned yesterday and by the time I got back to reviewing video I was too tired to do more than a little of it. I'm partway into the fourth of the nine files, though, and if I can get a couple of hours on it today I may be able to finish all of it.

Today I may very well get a FireWire card and cable. There's just one problem... I don't have a free PCI slot, so I'll have to check into a PCI expansion box. The alternative is to yank one of the existing cards to make room. I'm thinking the sound card will be the one to go and I'll just have to make do with the on-board audio in that case.

In any case I then have a choice about what to do with the work I've done so far. I could dump it and use Vegas to recapture the video using automatic scene recognition; that way I don't have to continue trimming the way I am now, but since I've come this far with it I think maybe I'll just carry on, and use the FireWire method after this.

Update: there ain't no such animal

I did a lunchtime run to Fry's to check out on a PCI expansion chassis. One kid there said he'd never heard of such a thing while another said he'd heard of them but never seen one in the store. Since Fry's is a major electronics vendor, selling everything down to individual chips and wires, this came as a great surprise.

I remembered that the major reason I got the sound card in the first place was because the on-board audio was causing performance problems. So now I'm stuck: I can't take out the sound card to make room for FireWire without restoring the performance problem it was installed to fix; I can't pull the modem without losing my Internet connection; no way am I pulling my FX5900 graphics card out.

Which means I have two choices. I can find a PCI expansion chassis somewhere at a reasonable price, or I can forget about FireWire until I upgrade my computer, which won't be happening any time soon.

Move over, Spielberg - part IV

So much for the review-fest last night... we got busy with some other things so I wasn't able to spend as much time on it as I'd thought. Still, out of nine files of raw video from the Reptile Expo I've tagged two and started on the third. If I can steam through three or four tonight I'll be on track to have all the good footage catalogued by the weekend... and there is some very good footage in there. It's looking like the first documentary is going to end up being around twenty minutes long.

I've also decided on how I'm going to present the material; I want to highlight the point that while most of the exhibitors at the show are there first and foremost to sell animals, everyone at the show is there because of their love of the animals and the passion they have for their care and treatment.

I'm also thinking about a couple of themes for the background music - I'm looking for a kind of "jungle" feel for the animals from that kind of habitat, and more of a "desert" atmosphere for those from dry climates. I don't consider myself a music composer by any stretch but the Acid software makes things so easy I'm certain I can come up with something that's at least halfway professional-sounding.

Move over, Spielberg - part III

I spent a while not so much reviewing the video as figuring out the best way to keep track of the material I want to use.

Because I can't use automatic scene detection at the moment, and because the capture program I'm using forces you to break the incoming video stream into sections of ten minutes or less, my raw video is split into a dozen or so files, each five to ten minutes long. It looks like the best way to handle this in the Vegas software is to load each file in turn into the trimmer, then mark each useful section as a region and save it as a subclip with a meaningful label. Having worked this out I actually got to review maybe five minutes of the raw video and create two subclips containing useful footage.

Now I have the technique sorted out, this evening is set to be a review-fest and by the time I'm done I'm hoping to have all the useful subclips in the project media pane.

I'm actually going to be creating two documentaries, not just one, because as well as going to the reptile expo we also stopped off at the Snake Farm in New Braunfels, and while the subject matter is very similar I decided it'd be better to give each one its own dedicated movie. I also have some ideas about how I want to present each movie, but that needs more thought. How I decide to do each will determine how I organize the clips to create the final movies.

I also checked into FireWire cards (Sony calls it "i.Link" but it's the same thing for all practical purposes). It turns out I can get a card for as little as $15, but I don't think that includes the cable. If I get away from the office early enough today to stop by Fry's on the way home, I may have a quick 5-minute check into that. There's no hurry though, so I may wait until the weekend.

Move over, Spielberg: Part II

I spent a couple of hours last evening preparing for the video editing work.

The first step was to make enough disk space available, since the raw video data from a camcorder takes a huge amount of disk space. As it happened my system was supplied with a 60Gb drive and I'd replaced that some time ago with a 160Gb. When I did that I disconnected the smaller unit but left it in place as an emergency backup. The bigger unit has worked fine all this time though, so I had no problem reconnecting and reformatting the 60Gb drive. That took about an hour.

The next step was to capture all the footage I took over the weekend. Since this happens at normal playback speed as the camera plays back the tapes and transfers the video over a USB cable, that took about another hour. I've made a mental note that when the time comes to upgrade the camera I'd like one that uses either mini disks or an exchangable hard drive. I also need to look into getting a FireWire card; the capture software won't do automatic scene recognition but Vegas will, but Vegas needs FireWire and won't capture through the USB. FireWire would make things easier all round and I think it's faster than USB too.

By the time I'd got all the video captured onto the hard drive it was getting pretty late so I spent a little while messing with some ideas for some background music (Vegas comes with Acid XMC in the box - a great little program that lets you create your own music. It's addictive... very easy to spend hours and hours playing around. Too easy, in fact).

Tonight the plan is to start into reviewing the footage and getting some ideas for some kind of storyboard for the documentary.

Move over, Spielberg (and Best Buy stinks!)

When we went to Chicago I bought a disposable camcorder from the pharmacy up the road. It cost about $20 and held about 20 minutes of video. When we got back I took the thing back to the pharmacy and they burned my footage onto a DVD for around $13.

Next came the fun part. With the DVD in the computer I could use the Movie Maker program included with XP to pull the footage apart into scenes and then put them together into the order I wanted, add transitions, background music, text, titles, and credits. With it all edited up I copied the file to my office laptop, which has a DVD burner, and I bought a 5-pack of blank DVD-R disks. The result is hardly Hollywood quality but as a first attempt it ain't bad and it's certainly better than I thought I'd be able to do myself.

All this goes to show that even just using a $20 throw-away camcorder and free software, it's not hard to put together something that's just a bit special.

Kate and I love movies and we've always thought it'd be great to make our own but while I've thought on occasion about buying a movie camera I'd always thought that making something more than just family home movies required expensive equipment.

Kate bought me a camcorder for my birthday. I was stunned. Since then I've messed about with it a little and got enough footage to be able to experiment with.

The first lesson I learned was that Windows Movie Maker is fine for simple work but it's extremely basic; it won't let you overlay one piece of video with another, for example, and more advanced stuff like green-screen is out of the question. I needed something better.

I bought a copy of Roxio's VideoWave 7. That went back to the store the next day, because after you've used it a few times the Media Manager program (needed to manage your scenes and takes) apparently corrupts its own data files and you have to re-install only to have the same thing happen later. Staples refunded my cash and the store manager was very interested in what I had to say about the program.

Next, I tried Magix Movie Edit Pro 10. This program was better, although it does some weird stuff on the screen as it starts up. Then I found that it won't handle a video file longer than about two and a half minutes - at that point on playback the image goes black although the sound continues. Magix didn't have a fix so that went back to the store too - Fry's, this time, who at first gave me a hard time about refunding opened software but eventually did the right thing.

Then I bought Pinnacle's Studio Plus 10 from Best Buy. This was a bad move on both counts. The program crashes when doing the simplest things. There are many, many posts on Pinnacle's consumer webboards saying that many, many people are having problems with this program. Pinnacle are apparently working hard to fix the problems but in the opinion of many including me, Pinnacle should never have put this product on shelves without a bunch more testing than they did.

Best Buy won't refund on open software (BASTARDS!). This together with the attitude of the w@nker in charge of customer 'service' at the Plano Best Buy has determined that I will never buy so much as a battery from Best Buy again. Pinnacle won't refund either (BASTARDS!), even though they know this program is crap, which means that I will never buy their products again either.

I finally got Sony's Vegas Movie Studio and at last have something that's worth the money.

Last weekend we drove down to San Antonio for the Texas Reptile Expo show and I got a chance to get some serious footage. The plan is to edit the material into a documentary and then post it somewhere and put a link on Kate's Animal Realm blog. I'm planning on getting started on the editing tonight. Watch this space...