Pete's guide to home video V - Editing your movie

Editing your movie

With all your video and audio files on your hard disk, you're ready to start putting it all together to create your movie. In this article I'm going to describe the sequence of steps I use to do this. It's useful to develop a general plan like this - it gives you something to work to, where you don't get stuck wondering what to do next, and can also give you a useful sense of progress as you go along.

Reviewing & trimming

The first thing I do is to review each shot using the NLE. As I play through each file I do a couple of things:

First, I jot down a note to say whether I even want to use the shot in the finished movie - in some cases, depending on how bad my camerawork was, more than half of the shots may not be useful.

Secondly I do my first pass of trimming - marking the start and end points of the useful footage (the NLE I use lets me save the marked sections as "subclips") so as to exclude lead-in, lead-out and other sections that I'm not interested in using. If I know in advance that I'm going to need some "freeze frame" effects, this is usually where I'll capture the frames I need.

As I'm going along I usually also make a note of the order I want the clips to appear in the final movie. This isn't set in concrete - more often than not I'll change the order a bit at a later stage, but by getting a feel for this at the review stage gives me something to work to in the next step, and that saves time. I can also mark up my B-reel footage.

Reviewing is possibly the most time consuming step, particularly if there are a lot of files to go through. Once I'm done reviewing, I can get to the fun part.

Laying down the main video track

This step is made much simpler by the notes I made in the previous step, about the order of the clips. It's just a case of dragging and dropping each clip onto the timeline in sequence. At this time I may change some of my decisions about the order of the clips (and the order may change again later, too).

This is where I make most of the decisions on how to transition between shots. In many cases I want a hard cut, straight from one shot into the next, but there will also be places where I want to cross-fade, or I may want to fade the end of one shot to black, hold it for a second, then fade the next shot in.

I mentioned in an earlier post that on occasion you may not have enough time between the end of some action and the end of the shot to be able to fade out properly; I suggested maybe using a freeze-frame. This is where I do this if I need to (or even if I don't need to but want to because it gives an effect I want); I capture the last frame of the action then drop it on the timeline immediately after the shot - the NLE by default will hold the image static for 5 seconds. I can then lengthen or shorten that as necessary, and fade it to black or cross-fade into the next shot (for example).

This may also be the best place to fix any audio/video sync problems, but we'll come to that later.

Transitions

Once I've got all the A-reel footage on the timeline I usually play the whole thing from beginning to end so I have a useful first look. I may make more changes to the order of the shots but the main job at this step is to finalize how each shot transitions to the next - hard cut, cross-fade or something else.

If I have a transition that represents a major change - a complete change of scene, perhaps, or to indicate the passage of time - I usually start with a plain cross-fade then experiment by trying other transitions such as linear wipes or maybe even "venetian blind" transitions.

Be careful with using too many fancy transitions because they're distracting; overdone, they'll make your work look amateurish.

B-reel overlays

By this point I should know where I have long, static shots that need some B-reel overlays to add interest. Since I already marked up my B-reel shots ready during the reviewing step, it's just a case of dropping them in place on the overlay track. Normally you wouldn't fade in or out - you just want a hard cut - and you don't normally need the audio track from the B-reel shots.

Often I find that I have static sections where I didn't know enough in advance to get specific B-reel footage to cover. This isn't a catastrophe because usually I can find some odd bits in the footage I cut out during trimming that are good enough to use as B-reel.

Special effects

This is the point where I add any special effects - it's fun to experiment with different effects and combinations. For example, I can increase the speed of a shot 20 or 30 percent, add a sepia tint and some jitter and scratches, and voila, I have something that looks like it was from the silent film era. Most NLEs that I've messed with come with a good package of special effect plugins.

Text overlays and titles

The last step. This is the point where I add any text overlays needed, such as descriptive captions. Also, this is where I put in opening titles and end credits, including the copyright notice and acknowledgements.

A complicated title sequence can be a project in itself - it's a lot of work but very satisfying to do, and adds a professional touch to your movies.

At this point the visual part of the job is done. Now to get to the sound part.

The voice track

Mostly this is straightforward stuff - the voice track from the video files will already be in place and you should have removed the unnecessary B-reel sound. There may be some tidying up to do, though.

The first thing to check is that the audio is in sync with the video. Normally this shouldn't be a problem but as I noted in an earlier post, if you import your data using USB you may find that the sound is out of sync by several frames on some shots. If it is and you didn't already fix it (as I mentioned earlier), now is the time to do that. Hopefully your NLE program will allow you to unlock the audio track from the matching video, "slide" the audio with respect to the video until they sync up correctly, then lock them again.

Listen to the overall sound level as the movie plays. You may need to pull down the volume in loud scenes and push it up in quieter places, to give your viewers an easier time.

Check how the sound is on the transitions between shots. On a blunt cut, the sound may snap in or out unpleasantly - this can usually be fixed by adding a short fade to the soundtrack at that point. If the video track has a crossfade then by default the sound will usually also be faded during the transition. Most times this is exactly what you want (which is why it's the default) but sometimes you may want to do things a little differently.

One common trick is to have the sound from the start of one shot be playing over the end of the previous shot. This is called a "J-cut". The opposite is called an "L-cut", where the sound from the end of one shot continues over the start of the video of the next shot. Both J-cuts and L-cuts are usually simple to acheive, but check your NLE manual for specifics.

Sound effects

Again, usually straightforward. You can get disks containing thousands of sound effects (animal noises, machines, weapons...) usually for just a few bucks; as I have mentioned, you can record your own. Just drop them onto the sound effects track, set the volume and any other adjustments you need, and you're done.

Music track

Very simple - just drop your music files onto the music timeline in the right places, set the volume levels (and modify the envelopes if you need to - refer to your NLE manual for details) and you're done.

The bigger problem is where to get the music in the first place. In general you can't just rip music from a CD and expect to be able to make your video available on Youtube or for sale on DVD - you'd probably be breaking the law.

There are basically three solutions I can think of: (1) Write your own music. Vegas Movie Studio includes Acid XMC and a set of loop files that you can use to create your own music, and other NLEs may be packaged with equivalent programs. (2) Buy royalty-free music. There are disks available filled with music of different styles that you can use for movie and other projects; there are also places you can download music files (they're usually not free). (3) You could always contact the publisher of the music you want to use and ask for permission.

Render

Your movie is to all intents and purposes complete. All that remains is to play it through from beginning to end a time or two to check that it all looks good, and do any last-minute tweaking. Once you're happy with how it looks, you can render the movie to a file.

How you render - that is, what type of file you create - depends on what you plan to do with your movie. For the web, WMV or MOV format is probably the best choice (AVI files are usually far too large). If you're planning to make your movie viewable on an iPod or PSP, you need MPEG-4 format. The standard format for DVD is MPEG-2, with a separate WAV file (usually 48KHz, 16-bit stereo) for the audio track (see your DVD burning software documentation for specifics).

The End

This concludes this short series of articles. Hope you found it useful!

Pete's guide to home video IV - Capturing your video

Capturing your video

You have your footage on tape in the camera. You need to get it onto your computer's hard disk so that you can begin editing. Here's how. By the time you're done capturing, your footage will be on your hard disk, probably in the form of a set of AVI files.

Formats - DV, MPEG

I'm assuming that your camera uses DV format (Digital8 or MiniDV tapes). If you have a camera that records in MPEG-2 format, such as one that records to an internal hard disk or on Mini-DVDs, the process may be different and this article may not be of much use. (Mini-DVD disks should drop straight into your computer's DVD drive - far more convenient than messing with cables and connectors.)

You need a huge disk

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, DV format provides only slight compression of the video data. As a result the camera records a LOT of data - about a gigabyte for every four minutes of footage - and the AVI files that will hold this data on your hard disk will be about the same size.

For this reason it's probably a good idea to have a large second disk for holding your video files, rather than putting it all on your system disk (the C: drive on a Windows system). There are other technical reasons for keeping the video files off the system disk if possible, such as that the computer will be accessing system files on that drive at the same time as you're editing and that will slow you down some.

I have a second internal disk, about 60GB, which is about full of video files. I also have an external 250Gb USB drive. My older footage is no longer on disk, but I keep all the original tapes so if I ever need to recover the stuff I can read it back in.

Disks are getting bigger all the time - 500Gb disks are available and affordable, and recently Toshiba (I think) announced a 1Tb (that's a Terabyte, or 1000 Gigabytes) disk that will soon be available for around $400US.

If you're planning on doing a lot of filming, I suggest getting the biggest disks you can afford.

USB vs. Firewire

If your camera has a Firewire interface I'd advise using that (you may need to buy a Firewire card for your computer). There are two reasons for this:

First, Firewire is a little bit faster than USB 2.0 (and a lot faster than USB 1.0). USB 2 actually streams data at 480 Megabits per second compared to 400Mb/sec for Firewire so appears at first sight to be faster, but USB has higher transmission overheads and the bottom line is that Firewire is actually the faster of the two in practice. There is also an 800Mb/sec version of Firewire, but I don't know if there are any cameras that use this (if there aren't yet, you can be sure there will be before long).

However, the main reason for using Firewire is that USB is notorious for getting the audio and video out of sync by the time the data gets to your hard disk. This is a widespread problem that seems to affect many cameras when using USB, and it's not always consistent - sometimes everything's in sync, sometimes it's off by four or five frames, maybe more.

If you have a camera that has only a USB interface this is something you should be aware of - and that you're stuck with, I'm afraid. You may be able to fix the problem during editing, if your editing program allows you to detach and "slide" the audio and video tracks with respect to each other. You could buy a clapperboard, just like professional film makers use - it makes it easier to sync the video and audio by lining up the "snap" sound with the video frame that matches. (And now you know what a clapperboard is for. I also read about one guy who, whenever he finishes a shot, steps in front of the camera and claps his hands a couple of times - about as effective, obviously cheaper, and a handy trick to remember.)

Very dependent on the software

Most camcorders include a capture program as part of the package. Unfortunately the performance and features of these programs usually leaves a lot to be desired. As an example, the software that came with my Sony camera limits you to 10 minutes of capture at a time and doesn't know how to break the data down into individual files for each shot. This means a lot of work in breaking the files down by hand before editing can begin in earnest - a time-consuming and irritating procedure.

The Vegas software I bought fixes that; it includes a far better capture program whose only downside is that it only works with Firewire. It senses the places where I started and stopped the camera and automatically uses those markers to break the data stream into individual files, one for each shot. It doesn't limit the length of a shot, so if I leave the camera running for 30 straight minutes (as I did once) it'll capture the lot into one 30-minute file without complaining. By the time I'm done capturing to disk, every shot is in its own file, numbered in sequence, ready for editing. Having once been through the manual process of cutting and trimming, which took me several evenings to complete, I can't recommend highly enough finding a capture program that does this step for you.

Additional sounds

Sometimes you might have a project that involves having additional sounds available. I have a pocket digital recorder that I can use for collecting such things as voiceover dialogue, odd sounds for use as effects, stuff like that. It connects with USB and I can save the sounds to my hard disk as WAV or MP3 files.

You can also buy royalty-free music and collections of sound effects for use in your movies.

The reason I mention these here is that gathering extra sound files can be considered part of the capture process, since you can't complete editing your movie until you have them and in my experience it's a good idea to have all your sound and video files in place ready before you start.

In the next (and last) article...

Editing your movie.

Pete's guide to home video III - Shooting your video

Shooting your video

So, you have your camera and you have your software - everything you need to shoot and edit your first movie.

I don't claim to be a top-notch movie maker. I haven't been to film school and everything I've learned about shooting video I've picked up from experience and by reading an article here and there. I still consider myself very much an amateur hobbyist. Nevertheless I can give a few simple pointers for those just getting started - nothing too complex, just a few tips that might save you having to learn the hard way. So, for what it's worth...

Read the camcorder manual

This may sound obvious, but I'll bet there are loads of people who (like me) just want to load a tape and press the "record" button, and don't take time to read the manual properly.

My advice is to take an hour or two to read the manual cover-to-cover. It pays off because you'll understand your camera better and know about all the features it has to offer, even if you don't remember exactly how to use them all; if you need a feature and know your camera will handle it, you can always look in the manual.

Start early, end late

By this I mean don't wait until the last possible instant before hitting "record", and don't stop rolling the instant the action is over. When possible start recording a few seconds before the action you want to capture, and always get a few seconds of extra footage before you stop.

The reason for this becomes plain when you come to do your editing. A few seconds of lead-in and lead-out on a shot gives you a little more room to manoeuver when you're trimming and fitting the shots together to build your movie. If the shot ends a tenth of a second after the action you're filming, you won't have time to do more than a hard cut to the next shot - you won't be able to put in a cross-fade or fade to black, for example. The best you might hope for is to freeze on a single frame to add the time you need for a fade.

Don't use in-camera special effects

Many cameras offer built-in special effects - negative image, sepia, black-and-white, soft-focus and so on. Don't use them.

If you do them in the camera, you can't undo them during editing - so if you film in black-and-white then realize during the editing that you really needed full colour for one shot, you're stuck.

All NLE programs I'm aware of offer more such effects, let you combine multiple effects (something the camera probably won't let you do) and generally do them better anyway. You're really better off waiting until the editing phase - that way you can decide which effects you want, if any, and get the final footage looking exactly how you want it.

Avoid fast zooms during the action

Fast zooms in and out in the middle of a shot look really amateurish in the finished movie. If you need to zoom, try to keep it slow and smooth.

That's not to say that you should never use fast zooms. Sometimes they can be good for effect, especially if you've planned the shot in advance and you know it's what you want. Some people like to keep the camera rolling between shots rather than stopping and starting the camera, and will zoom quickly between "shots" to get the angle they need. On occasion this can pay off unexpectedly - I've heard of people catching something on film that they'd have missed otherwise, or ending up with footage that was so striking that they just had to put it in the finished movie because it looked so good after all.

B-reel footage

The next time you watch a movie, look out for sections where two characters are having a longish conversation in a quiet place. What you're looking for are parts where one character has a long dialogue. Watch the camera angles. Does the camera stay on that character for the whole time they're speaking? In general, it won't - you'll see the camera switch to the other person at intervals, showing them listening for a second or two, before going back to the speaking character.

One way this is done during editing is to simply lay down the whole shot of the speaker on one track, then overlay a second or two of footage of the listener (without sound) every so often on an "upper" video track.

To be able to do that, you're going to need footage of the listener simply sitting there, not speaking. That's B-reel footage, and you should plan to shoot a few seconds of that stuff here and there so that you can do just these kinds of overlays when you come to editing. B-reel shots like this add interest to your finished movie because they break up long, static shots. The crazy thing is that nobody will notice if you do this, but everybody will notice if you don't - they'll sit for maybe 15 seconds of watching your speaker speak in an unchanging field, then they'll wonder how much longer he's going to gas on before something important happens.

Sound

Getting the sound right in your finished movie is quite possibly the single most difficult challenge there is. When you're filming, your ears are selective - you'll hear what you want to hear and it's natural to think that it'll all sound the same on playback. Wrong! When you review your footage you'll hear all kinds of background noises that you just didn't notice at the time. They're distracting and annoying, and by the time you notice them it's probably too late to do anything about them.

As an example, if you like, take a look at my 15-minute documentary of a Texas Reptile Expo and watch the section starting at about 8:40 where I talked to the nice lady from the Texas Reptile Hospice and Sanctuary. The place was crowded so there's a lot of background noise, but in particular there were a couple of people talking loudly nearby that I just didn't notice at the time.

On playback it got really bad, with this guy talking about how he was breeding snakes and getting louder and louder until it drowned out just about everything else. At that point the footage became unusable and I had to snip it. (Incidentally, you may notice how I used B-reel footage in a couple of places in that segment.)

The point is to be aware of background noises so that you can try to control the situation. Had I been conscious of the loud people nearby, I could have done something about it.

In the next article...

Capturing your video.

Pete's guide to home video II - Choosing your software

Choosing your software

First, I must point out that I'm a Windows XP user. I'm told that Macs have some great software available for dealing with multimedia, including some really good video and audio editors, but because I've never used a Mac I can't say anything about that. What I write here is based purely on my Windows experience.

Also, I've had some bad experiences with some of the editing software, and I won't be holding back about that because I feel that someone has to warn you, gentle reader, before you go spending your hard-earned beans on software that just doesn't do what you're paying for. We'll get to the lemons shortly.

Let's start by assuming you know nothing about editing video.

What is an NLE?

NLE stands for Non Linear Editor, which just means that you're not tied to editing your video stream in the order that it comes out of the camera. You can trim clips, move them around, lay them over each other and all kinds of other things.

Different NLEs provide different features but most of them follow a pattern. There's a timeline on the screen, usually running from left to right, where you can drag and drop your individual video clips from your camera and arrange them into time order. The timeline is usually arranged as tracks laid one above another, so that you can line up video on one track and audio on another. The Vegas software I use gives you six tracks - three video and three audio - and you can add a seventh (either video or audio) if you need one. Just to give you an idea, the three video tracks are one for your raw video, one for overlays and special effects and one for text such as subtitles and credits (but you're not constrained to use them just for those purposes - those are just labels); the audio tracks are for the voice track from your video, background music and sound effects. The professional version lets you create as many video and audio tracks as you like.

To get a feel for an NLE, try out the Windows Movie Maker that comes as standard with XP (I understand Mac comes with a bundled NLE too). Switch from the 'storyboard' view to the 'timeline' view to see what I mean. WMM is very basic (only one track for video, one for text overlays, two audio tracks, and a limited number of transitions and effects) but it contains all the basic features that all NLEs have. Try using it a bit to make a short movie - getting an understanding of the process will help when you buy some better software, I guarantee it.

Some NLE programs

There are lots of NLEs available - go to your local software store and you'll find a wide range. That means that choosing a good one can be a problem. I went through three awful programs before finding the one that works for me, so while I can't provide a comprehensive rundown I can tell you what I know. For what it's worth, here it is:

Ulead software is supposed to be pretty good - I can't vouch for that so you may want to check online for reviews.

Roxio VideoWave 7 gave me bad headaches last year. I don't know if the problems have been fixed but when I tried it, it kept corrupting its own data files and had to be reinstalled only to have the same problem happen again and again. Other users on their web forums complained of the same problems.

Magix Movie Edit Pro 10 was better but I found that it wouldn't preview any video clip longer than about two and a half minutes - the audio kept playing but the preview screen went blank. Their tech support guy was sympathetic but couldn't help, so it went back to the shop.

Pinnacle Studio Plus 10... what can I say about this software except NEVER, EVER BUY THIS PRODUCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Some people are able to use it without problems, but it seems that for most people it simply doesn't work. I beefed about this in a post in November; I just looked at the web boards and it seems the problems are still there. Don't waste your money.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio+DVD Platinum

This is what I use now. I should say I don't work for Sony and they're not paying me to say this, but this is what I'd recommend. It's a bit more complicated to use than some of the other offerings, but that's because it gives you far better control over the whole editing process. And it works.

So... what to look for in an NLE

Since all good NLEs let you perform the basic editing functions that you need, the differences between them boil down to utility and additional features.

This means that you should think a little about what you want to be able to do in your videos, so that you can find software that provides the features you need. Want to be able to do bluescreen/greenscreen effects? How about slow-motion or playing a section of video backwards? Or being able to freeze a single frame then zoom into some detail in the frozen image? What about being able to download free plugins to add new features to your software? Does the software provide you with a useful set of transitions, sound effects and other media files right out of the box? Can you download extra content like that for free? And very important: how is the tech support? The questions you ask will help you find the software that will do what you need.

In the next article...

Tips for shooting your video.

Pete's guide to home video I - Intro/Choosing a camcorder

Introduction

Last November and December I posted here almost daily about the process I went through to create a video documentary. Since then I've done quite a bit more filming and editing, and I've learned a bunch about the whole process from filming to burning a DVD, and I've decided to post a short series of articles here for other people who are relatively new to video.

Most of the stuff I'll be covering should be pretty much common-sense but in a few places I may make comments that are based on personal opinion - I'll try to mark any such sections. Also, bear in mind that I use a particular camcorder (a Sony DCR-TRV280) and particular editing software (Sony Vegas Movie Studio+DVD Platinum) so what I say will naturally be slanted toward those.

And so, without further ado...

Choosing your camcorder

When choosing a camcorder there are a couple of things to look for in particular. The first is the format used to record video.

Formats

There are several recording formats and media types. Let's take a look at the most common. I've included a few examples of camcorders that use each format, together with prices, but note that the prices are not necessarily typical - for example, the range of MiniDV camcorders available is wide and you can pay as little as about $250 or as much as $3700, or more.

VHS-C

VHS-C uses the same recording format as standard VHS tapes but the tapes are smaller (the 'C' stands for Compact). This is an analog format, so getting the video into your computer for editing may be a problem and there may be a loss of image quality. There are still a couple of VHS-C camcorders available, and they're not expensive; if all you want to do is shoot your film and drop the tape into a standard VHS player (you use an adapter that lets you do that), this may be for you. On the other hand, if you want to be able to edit your footage into something you can give to friends and family on DVD, VHS-C probably isn't a good choice. Bear in mind also that these cameras have essentially been made obsolete by digital camcorders and may not be available for much longer.

Example: JVC GRSXM38US, $230

Hi8

This is another analog tape format. Once common, there aren't many Hi8 camcorders available these days (Sony lists only one Hi8 model at this time). Like VHS-C, Hi8 camcorders may not be around for much longer.

Example: Sony CCD-TRV138, $240

MiniDVD and Hard Disk camcorders

Most camcorders that record onto these media use the MPEG2 format - the same format used on standard DVDs that you buy. MPEG2 compresses the video data pretty heavily, losing image quality in the process (freeze-frame a DVD movie and take a close look at the TV screen to see the effect) which means that when you get the video data into your editing program it's already suffered a drop in quality before you even begin working on it. For this reason many people don't like to use MPEG2 as the recording format.

You can usually record 30 minutes of video on a MiniDVD (although some cameras can push this to 120 minutes at lower image quality). Hard-disk cameras can record several hours of video, but the downside is that when the disk is full you're stuck until you can transfer the data to your computer - as yet I'm not aware of any camcorders with removable hard disks.

Examples: (DVD) Sony DCR-DVD105, $500; (HD) Sony DCR-SR100 30GB, $1000

Digital8 and MiniDV

DV format is slightly compressed so the image quality is better than MPEG2 but the resulting files are pretty huge - you'll burn up a gigabyte in about four minutes. MiniDV and Digital8 both use DV format but Digital8 tapes are physically larger (actually, they're Hi8 tapes - the camera just records the video data digitally instead). One MiniDV or Digital8 tape holds an hour of video. MiniDV is the format of choice for most serious home-video enthusiasts and also for many professionals.

Examples: (Digital8) Sony DCR-TRV280, $280; (MiniDV) Sony DCR-HC46, $500

DVCAM and DVCPRO

These are formats used by expensive, professional cameras. DVCAM is basically an upgraded version of the DV format used on MiniDV and Digital8 tapes.

Example: Sony HDW900 (as used by George Lucas to film Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith), $115,000

Features

The other thing to look for when choosing a camcorder is the range of features on offer. Some features are simply candy, and don't do much for you. However there are features that are a real boon. Let's look at some.

Autofocus

You really can't do without this. However there are times when you may want to switch it off so that the camera doesn't refocus on a background object if your subject moves to one side for a moment. Make sure your camera gives you the option to switch off the autofocus and give you manual control.

Zoom

Another indispensible feature. Beware that there are two kinds of zoom - analog zoom, where the focal length of the camera lens is adjusted, and digital zoom where the effect is simulated electronically. A good analog zoom is what you want - digital zoom works by restricting the number of pixels on the camera's sensor that are used to create the image; at extreme zoom only the few thousand pixels at the centre of the sensor are used, so the image is extremely pixellated and low quality.

FireWire (a.k.a. i.Link or IEEE 1394)

Most cameras have a USB connector for transferring your video data to a computer for editing, but (especially for MiniDV/Digital8 cameras) this isn't the best way; USB has a tendency to get the audio and video signals out of sync with each other. FireWire is far better. Consider this an essential.

Steadyshot

This lets the camera compensate for camera shake when you're filming hand-held without a tripod or other support. If you're like me, 90% or more of your video will be taken hand-held, so this feature is very handy to have.

Backlight

There will be times when you need to shoot a subject against a relatively bright background. In these cases the automatic exposure on the camera will underexpose your main subject so that it comes out looking very dark. The backlight feature lets the camera adjust the exposure according to the brightness of the subject in the centre of the field of view - the background ends up overexposed but your main subject looks better. Not a vital feature, but very useful sometimes.

Low-light shooting

A feature I never thought I'd use, then on the first trip out with the camera I found myself in a small zoo that kept kinkajous and bats in a darkened enclosure - something I couldn't have possibly filmed without Nightshot, because it was simply too dark.

Many cameras are able to shoot in low light because they have very sensitive CCDs. Some augment this with an infra-red light emitter and sensor, making it possible to film in pitch blackness - very useful if you're into wildlife photography and you want to film animals at night without disturbing them.

1-CCD/3-CCD

Most of the lower-end cameras have one CCD sensor, but some new consumer-level cameras are now boasting the 3-CCD setup previously only available in more expensive cameras. In a 3-CCD camera there are sensors for each primary colour - a 1-CCD camera separates the colours using special filters and electronics. 3-CCD cameras are generally regarded as having better image quality. Not an essential feature but something to be aware of when shopping for cameras.

High definition

Not essential, but HD cameras are coming down in price so you might want to consider this.

In the next article...

What to look for in your editing software.

Hi speed (hic!) inter(hic!)net; Video; Darkstar One

Hi speed (hic!) inter(hic!)net

As mentioned at the end of the last post, we have a problem with our newly-installed high-speed internet connection. It gets very flaky -- web pages timing out, mail not connecting, all that stuff. Strangely it seems to happen mostly in the early part of the evening, say from about 4pm until 8 or 9pm. I tried plugging my office laptop directly into the back of the modem instead of going through the router, and saw the same problem this time. When I tried that before it worked fine -- but that was around 10pm, maybe later.

In any case, the fact that I can make it happen without the router or the long cable that connects it proves that the problem, if it's in our house at all, can only be in the cables or the modem. The fact that it's worse at certain times of day suggests that the wiring and the modem are not the problem -- I can't see how the modem could have problems only at certain times, unless it's missing happy hour at its favourite bar.

We have a tech dude coming to the house tomorrow evening to troubleshoot. I'm hoping he can find the problem and fix it right there on the spot, but we'll see.

Video

I suggested in the last post that I might write up some stuff I've learned about video work as a series of posts. Well, a comment flooded in, asking me to do that. So I will. Watch this space.

Darkstar One

New game! Ascaron's Darkstar One shipped last week and hit the shelves here on Friday. I've played it for a bit and despite some downsides it's very good. Upsides: graphics are good (although I do see some framerate slowdown at times on my less-than-optimal system), I like the storyline, it's challenging enough to stay interesting. Downsides: Missions, trade stations, even star systems are very samey, and there's not much to explore. Maybe Ascaron will do a "Plus" version as they did with Sacred Plus, to address some of that.

It's also very addictive. Tonight, I will be doing something else.

Look Upon my Blog and Despair

...which is exactly what I've been doing, since I haven't posted a damned thing here since April. This isn't because I haven't wanted to write, but because I seem to have been permanently blocked.

Regular readers may have noticed in the past that I've written about things that disturb me in the good ol' USA -- the simian president and his corrupt repugnican menagerie, for example, or the rabid religious right and the way they're trying to destroy the place. The trouble is that writing about that stuff makes my BP go up even higher, and frankly I decided to try to chill for the sake of my health.

Hence the more recent writings have tended to be about more laid-back subjects such as home video, or computer games, or podcasts. But the cool, crystal wellspring of inspiration about such things slowed to a trickle, and finally turned into a kind of stagnant muddy puddle with dead bugs floating in it.

Today I resolved to force myself to write something. Be prepared, gentle reader, for a collection of random brain-farts as I try to scrape the rust off my brain's writing lobe...

Video

I have work to do. I took about 90 minutes of video in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland a few months ago when we went up to visit number-two son. A few weeks after that I got another couple of tapes worth at the Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival down in Waxahachie. Both sets of tapes have been captured onto my hard drive, and I reviewed the first set... and that's as far as I've got. So I have to make a start into picking out the usable stuff and editing it into to some sort of order.

Maybe I should write a series of posts about videography. I'll consider that idea.

Games

Kate and I have been playing Sacred again, probably for the first time in a year. I'd forgotten how much fun that game is. We also went ahead and bought Sacred Underworld, the expansion pack, and that's cool too -- the graphics are definitely smoother than the original. There's a sequel on the way (Sacred: Dark Angel, I think it's going to be called) but I don't know when they're planning on releasing that yet.

Ascaron, the company that makes Sacred, has just released a space-sim called Darkstar One which looks like Freelancer on steroids. I played the free demo a few weeks ago and it looks pretty good.

I also got Half-life 2: Episode 1 right after it came out. Regular readers may cast their minds back to Christmas 2004, when I wrote on this very blog about how I would never buy another game that uses Steam. Ok, I lied. Half-life is just too good a game to miss out on. I still think Steam stinks, though.

Speed

We finally bit the bullet, got broadband installed and joined the rest of the twenty-first century. It hasn't been without its own little family of problems, though...

Setting the thing up the first time, I just couldn't get it to connect to the Internet. The problem turned out to be the order you power things up the first time -- you have to put the router on first, then the modem, and not the other way round like the manual said.

With that hurdle passed, we were off and running... or so we thought. We realized pretty soon that there was some kind of serious problem -- the connection would just seize up for twenty or thirty seconds at a time, so web pages would time out and mail wouldn't send, and all the rest.

I finally narrowed it down to a problem either in the router or the cable connecting it to the modem. "Can't be the router," I thought, because it's a Linksys made by Cisco, and Cisco know a thing or two about networks. So I replaced the cable thinking maybe I'd stretched it or kinked it or something when I was feeding it behind the furniture.

Wrong. Kate and I were very, very careful not to bend, kink, stretch or perform any other kind of topological operation on the cable as we put it in place... and it made no difference at all. The problem was still there. Bugger.

So last night I ran out to Fry's to get another router -- a Netgear, this time -- and it looks like our problems have gone away. Note to readers: avoid the Linksys BEFSR41 router -- online reviews weren't great and it sure looks like we got a bad one. The Netgear is smaller, works better and was cheaper, too.

Stop Press... the problems came back, so it wasn't the router after all, so ignore what I said about the Linksys router. Looks like the problem is at our provider's end. More on this as it develops...

Snake Farm IV

I've done all I'm going to do with the Snake Farm video. I only had about 15 minutes of raw footage to start with and much of that was unusable because of bad lighting, bad sound, shaky camerawork and so on, and as a result I ended up with only two or three minutes of "good" footage. What I've done is basically a slideshow made up from 4-second segments, with a backing music track. You can download it from here if you'd like to see it - it runs a little over a minute and the file is a bit more than 2Mb - not particularly big.

As you might see from the link, I'm using savefile.com as the host - unlike VidiLife and YouTube, they don't mess with the video files and you can actually download them (VidiLife only allows you to view videos on their page or embed it in another page - there's no way for anyone to download a copy; YouTube also messes with your files but I can't say whether they allow downloads).

The Reptile Expo and the Snake Farm between them have been a great learning experience. These first two videos aren't exactly Hollywood quality but I've learned a lot about how I can improve my camera and sound work in future so I'm hoping that any other movies I create will that much stronger as a result.

I have ideas for two new projects. More on these later, when I've thought them out a bit more.

Snake Farm III

I actually managed to finish cutting clips and laying them on the timeline yesterday evening. I still need to create something as an opening - at the moment the first thing you see is a cut straight into the first shot (a fifteen-foot albino boa constrictor). Since the last clip is a map showing how to get to the farm, zoomed and rotated, I'm thinking a similar zoom-rotate shot as the first clip might "bookend" the whole thing nicely. The question is what exactly to zoom and rotate...

Anyway once I have something in place I can finish up the backing music. I have the beginnings of a "jungle" theme but it still needs a lot of work.

I also have an idea for a couple of pan/zoom overlays that might add some interest to what is otherwise not much more than a slideshow. However, from what I've read on the Vegas Movie Studio forum I'm not sure that what I have in mind is possible - apparently if you zoom out to create a picture-in-picture effect, you can't then use pan and keyframes to move it around the screen. To me that sounds strange, so I'll be doing a little experimentation to make sure of this.

Snake Farm II

With Christmas and all going on, I haven't spent much time on the Snake Farm video at all. I've categorized the different clips into media bins to make them easier to work with, and I've trimmed a handful and got them into the timeline, and that's about it.

Part of the problem is that I'm an incurable gamer, and amongst other things I got games for Christmas - Donny got me a copy of F.E.A.R. which I've been playing since Monday; Kate got me Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Serious Sam II, which I'm not even going to install until I've played F.E.A.R. through to the end.

I'll have to impose a bit of self-discipline to stay focused on the video work first and save the games for later.

For Christmas I also got a DVD burner and a 300Gb USB hard drive - so now I can create my own DVDs directly from DVD Architect on my own machine instead of having to move an MPEG file to my office laptop for burning, and also I now have plenty of disk space for capturing and working on video. I actually created a menu-based DVD of the reptile expo video the other day and it looks great, considering it was thrown together in just a few minutes.

So tonight, assuming I can get a couple of hours in, I'm determined to push some more on the Snake Farm video and if possible at least get all the clips laid down on the timeline. Depending on how well that goes I may spend a little while working on some backing music for it too, but I'm guessing I won't have much time for that.

Snake Farm I

I recaptured the video footage from the Snake Farm (which isn't actually a farm - it's more like a small zoo) using the FireWire this time instead of USB. What a difference - Vegas Movie Studio imports the video and splits each take into its own file on the fly, so I don't have to go through manually this time. I'm hoping it fixes the audio/video sync problem that the USB caused too.

So now I have an empty project with all the media clips ready - it took me three or four days to get to this point with the Reptile Expo movie.

I'm stepping back a bit while I think about what to do this time. In the reptile expo I got about 45 minutes of raw footage which rendered down to a 15-minute documentary by the time I'd trimmed out footage that was unusable because of bad camerawork. I hope to get better with practice, but for now I'm guessing that on average I get one minute of usable footage for every three minutes of raw material. I got about 15 minutes at the Snake Farm so I'm guessing my end result is going to be about 5 minutes long - hardly what I'd call a documentary. So what I have in mind is to pull a few seconds footage of each animal, synchronize the cuts with the background music beat and just create a kind of slideshow without narration.

I also have an idea for a map at the end to show where the farm is - to do that I'll start with a still of a map then rotate it and zoom in simultaneously to a certain point, then freeze it and add a text overlay showing how to find the place.

I'm really not happy with the way vidiLife messed with my video so I'm looking at another couple of places to host the files - YouTube.com and PutFile.com have been recommended and the first one looks pretty good (I haven't looked at PutFile yet).

Move over, Spielberg - part XIX

The video is up and live...HERE.

I put it in Vidilife.com but it may not stay there - for some reason their system "processed" my video file, adding in their logo at the start of the video. I originally uploaded three different renders for different download speeds (56k modem and a couple of higher speeds) but the lower-speed renders have disappeared.

Next video project will be the Snake Farm, which should go a lot quicker now that I'm a good way up the Vegas Movie Studio learning curve. But, I'm going to take a break for a few days before I start into that.

Move over, Spielberg - part XVIII

I have a first cut complete and ready to roll. I have no illusions about the quality - I know the camera work could be a little less shaky; I know I'm not a professional voice performer; I know some of the audio has background sounds that are distracting (in particular, some guy talking loudly somewhere near me when I was recording the lady from the reptile shelter - I didn't notice him at the time but on the playback it's almost painful to listen to). In the process of making this one I've learned a bunch, so in future I'll be able to do better.

The question is, where to host? I was planning on putting it on Google's video hosting service but to do that I'll have to re-render as MPEG2 or MPEG4 with MP3 audio. Also, it looks like Google is a way to sell videos - not that I have a problem with people paying for my work, but for one thing this documentary has a very limited market (mainly the exhibitors at the show, I think) and secondly I don't feel right about charging for this one. I found a couple of other places for free hosting but they have their own problems - for example, one has a 20Mb limit... and the high-quality render I have is 125Mb.

I'll be spending a little time later today looking around some more to see where I can find to host the stuff. If I find somewhere I can put it as-is I may upload it today; if not, or if I need to re-render in a different format it'll probably be tomorrow - I say "probably" because we're forecast snow, and the way people drive around here I have no intention of sharing the roads with them if there's ice and snow on the floor.

Move over, Spielberg - part XVII

Very, very close

I recorded the narration script yesterday and added it to the project timeline; I've also added the background music. Since I only have another couple of weeks before the next reptile expo I decided to use some ready-done royalty-free music for the music rather than trying to write my own.

There are just four things left to do: first, two or three sections of the narration don't sound so good, so I think I'm going to re-record them; second, in one particular spot the music doesn't give the right atmosphere (jolly, happy music for a Brown Recluse spider? I don't think so); third, the sound balance isn't right - the narration track needs to be a little louder relative to the background music; finally, I really need to do a better job with the production logo.

Just another hour or two should do it...

Move over, Spielberg - part XVI

Last night I shuffled a few pieces of video around on the timeline and fixed a couple of problems I'd noticed. It looks a little better every day.

More importantly I've finished writing out the script for the narration track. I'll probably have to make adjustments on the fly when I'm editing it in, but I think it's very close to how it'll be in the finished documentary. All that remains is to actually record it then edit it in. The final steps will be to add the backing music track and create a new production logo. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this over the weekend and upload it Monday - in plenty of time for the next expo, which is on December 17.

Move over, Spielberg - part XV

Kate helped me with getting the end credits looking better - simple changes like a better choice of fonts and colours can make all the difference. I want to slow down the speed the credits scroll at, so I'm going to add another couple of Kate's stills to the four that are already there as background so that I can stretch out the credit scroll on the timeline. That should do the trick.

The production logo I have at the moment was thrown together and isn't very good so I'm considering it a placeholder and I'm going to create a new one from scratch. Kate told me she has a couple of ideas for that, so let's see what we can come up with. I must remember to add a copyright notice.

I shuffled a couple of events around on the timeline, then made a draft render as a small-format AVI. Now I can review this to spot any places that need more work and also to give me something to work with while timing the narration. On playing it through I spotted a section that needs the audio & video synced better, and a discontinuity I missed that needs a cross-fade to make it look cleaner.

Still working on the narration track script - at a guess I'd say I'm about half finished.

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...