Video production tips...

Thought I might offer a few simple ideas for those who are interested in making videos of their C-Moto and putting them on Youtube for sharing.

First - Garbage in Garbage out
This is never more true than in video production. Still photographs are easy to manipulate and post process. Cropping and color correction of a still photo is a powerful way to get the most impact from an image.

Working with video does not have this luxury as the video must fill the frame to look natural. Anytime you zoom into a video to effective "crop" it, you'll loose resolution and the digitization will occur extremely fast at anything over 5-10% enlargement. For this reason, it's important to get your video captures right, the first time. Lots of things can be done to help this.

Video:

1) Take lots of video. Give yourself a few seconds at the beginning and end of each capture. This will give you more "room" to work with the clip once it's imported to your video software project.

2) Learn proper photographic composition on a still camera!!! This can NOT be over emphasized. A good video take is like a series of good still images put together over time...this is why they used to be called "motion pictures"

3) Don't be afraid to play with speeding up and slowing down clips. Slow motion can really accentuate some fine details in action while speeding up can compress long sequences into a short time and lend a sense of urgency.

Sounds:

1) Capture not only for sight, but sound. Sounds is a huge dimension to any video and should not be ignored at the least. Don't make obvious sound breaks from clip to clip - blend them if you can at transitions. Also, don't think that you HAVE to use the sound track recorded live in the capture.

Let the camera run for 5-10 minutes recording "ambient" sounds. This could be anything from trickling water, to a crowd of people, of the sound of an engine. This gives you sound material to work with in your project and be creative with it's application.

2) If you're throwing a music track in a project, don't simply stick video clips over the sound track. Listen to the music and time video transitions to breaks beats in the music. Listen to cymbals or crashes - these are great places to place video transitions.

3) The video and audio must work together! Be sure the editing software you use will show you the wave form of your sound clips. Timing a transition to a snare hit should be precise down to the millisecond. Human senses are fully capable of detecting differences in the tenth's of a second range. To get this right, being able to see the wave form is crucial

Uploading to Youtube:

This one took me a lot of experimentation to figure out. But for right now, the best format I can find is using DIVX encoder (pro version is 20USD) and set it to keep file size under 100mb (youtube's limit). No need to rezise the video to 320x240. Convert it and rename the .divx extension to .avi. Upload it to Youtube and check your quality! It's about as good as it gets!

That's it for now. Happy video-production-ing! :clap:

CC

Just wanted to add:

Adobe bundles Premiere and Photoshop Elements together in a package for 149.99USD. That's like 15 bucks in Canada! :thumbup:

http://www.adobe.com/products/psprelements/

I strongly recommend it if you've got the dosh. This is a fantastic way to improve both your images and video as well as provide a good segway should you decide to spend more time/resources on it.

CC

Actually, last I heard I believe our dollar was about a cent less then the US dollar again?

There is also a lot of good free software out there for people with a budget, or who just want to work on stuff for fun.

For those who want to keep their bucks to fill up the tank without falling in the software piracy there is always the excellent opportunity to look at the free open source alternatives.

Ubuntu Studio is the multimedia (audio, graphics, video) edition of the best Linux distribution Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com). Check at http://ubuntustudio.org/

The last release 8.04 is just coming out.

Enjoy the libre.

Brice

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jim

Actually, last I heard I believe our dollar was about a cent less then the US dollar again?

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Just checked, looks like 1USD=1.01615CAD. I'll be damned! I figured the USD wold just keep going down! Wonder how they calculate this stuff.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jim

There is also a lot of good free software out there for people with a budget, or who just want to work on stuff for fun.

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Yeah well there's all kinds of ways to get "free" software. Open source stuff is cool too but might not integrate with other apps as well and are more likely to compete for same resources.

Most important things is to use what you're happy and comfortable using.

CC

Well it isn't all open source... Windows itself comes with some tools (or you may need to download them for free), windows movie maker and windows media encoder. Usually for youtube projects these offer you enough flexibility, and they're easy to use...

Or Avid has a free version, more info on the top 5 free video editing software:

http://www.desktop-video-guide.com/t...re-review.html

more here:

http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/edi...reevidedit.htm


I've used Ulead Media Studio, http://www.ulead.com/vs/features.htm it seems to be pretty good too. That adobe bundle seems like a good deal though, but I wonder what is cut out feature wise in the elements version?

If the Adobe bundle offered any more, I think it would be come too complicated for the casual user. The main thing is it uses their professional rendering engines and you can have both PS and Premiere open at the same time with minimal risk of crashing.

The newest version of Premiere give you a more professional slide control for the audio channels and the ability to add key frames to video clips.

http://www.adobe.com/products/premie..._285x200_3.jpg


The slide control is like that you'd find on a mixing board. It will record the dB settings of that track as it's played giving you a more analog command over the track volume. For example, lets say you have two audio tracks in your video, one is "live" track (the audio recorded with the video as shot) and a "music" track (music inserted into a project).

Then let's say at 15 seconds into your video you have music playing in the back ground but you want to bring out the sound of an engine as it revs up for a jump. At about 10 seconds (5 seconds before you want the engine sound) slowly start moving the slider down so the music track is almost entirely adjusted out (to maybe -25dB or whatever level you want) allowing the "live" track to take center stage. After the live track is done and you want the music to return, move the music track slider back to 0db. The software has recorded your "analog" inputs of the music track level and stored it on the track.

Now stop the playback and return to the beginning (time 0sec) and play again. Watch the slider as it automatically moves up and down according to the input you just made. The data points of your inputs should be displayed in the track time-line as well where they can be clicked and dragged around.

You can, of course, do this with a default audio transition by dragging and dropping a "gain fade" onto a clip but that only works at the beginning and ends of clips so you'd have to cut (or razor) your audio track. Also, automatic transitions (for both audio and video) are usually set to apply a linear behavior to an effect, which works most of the time, but isn't sufficient when you get into the subtleties of audio and video effects/transitions. You can hear the effects of this in the ChongQing video if you listen carefully. Good sound editing is non-obvious, meaning the listener doesn't even notice it's there but you'll feel it. Bad sound editing will make make you squint your eyes and want to throw your tv out a window.

Key frames are essentially extremely minute mapped control points over almost any and every aspect of a clip's effects and/or properties giving you a detailed graphic understanding of the action's behavior. Key frames are available in both audio and video properties and can have bezier curves applied to them which are more parabolic than linear. Although it may seem like a minute difference, when getting into the subtleties you're scrutinizing every frame.

I'm not saying that Premiere is better than any other software, but it's what I 'm familiar with and extremely satsified with it's output. Whether or not its right for you depends on your projects and what you're looking to produce with them. Just like anything else, there are lots of reviews of the software on the net and most of them think Premiere elements is a solid product and some users say "90 percent of the Pro version" while others don't like it. I've used both Premier Pro and Elements 3.0 and could do 90 percent of my film work on Elements, but 3.0 doesn't offer the same sound editing power as 4.0.

If you don't know but want to find out, you can always download a trial version of almost any software and see for yourself. Whatever it is you choose to use, the most important thing is to actually use it. Creating video is not any easier than learning how to paint or photograph and only gets better with practice and more technical understanding of what's involved.

CC

I don't disagree, and Adobe I think is one of the top names out there, so it is quality software, I was just adding for people who may not want to spend any money that there is some decent free software.

I was unaware of this package and may look into it when I save up a bit more money, but my planned spending list is longer then my desired work for income list right now :clap:


I was going to ask you, about the maps and satellite views on your dvd, that is recorded from google earth some how? Just a program like fraps or camstasia? Did you have any concern about copyright issues?

Carl I forgot I was going to ask, what you used for a video camera when you were producing your dvd?

The camera video camera I used was a consumer level 5 year old JVC MiniDV. It is about as homegrown as you can get for a project like this and it shows video quality wise...esp when viewing on a flat panel. At the time I didn't have money for anything better because I dropped most my cash on a D70 and a bunch of lenses...one of which could have easily covered the cost of a video camera. Between the two, I've found you can use photo in video but not vice-versa.

The satellite imagery was a big problem for me when producing the film. The captures all come from Fraps, which is a great software for this purpose. The most difficult part is not so much the capturing of the footage but animating the mapping software then capturing it smoothly.

I was first using Google Earth as it's the easiest interface to use and also provides the best selection to high resolution images. Only problem is these images come with very serious copyright requirements and, after much research, found that using Google Earth in a film was not possible. I needed an alternative option...

Then I hear about NASA's World Wind project which is completely free to use however you want. It uses a different set of images (Blue Marble) and has almost no real high res data from private companies but puts together a cleaner "globe" as it lacks overlayed high res strips and unifies the color of the earth's surface.

- Click for NASA World Wind site -
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/graphi...nshots/-00.jpg

Although it's slower to use than Google Earth, World Wind gives a more artistic representation to the Earth than Google and records different kinds of information, like geologic events...

<Click for bigger>
- Dust storm off coast of Morocco -
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/graphi...nshots/-17.jpg

- Los Angeles Forest Fires -
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/graphi...nshots/-15.jpg

Learning WorldWind took some time as well since the "Flyover" interface is much less user friendly than GE. World Wind needed to load a script file to play a flyover and this had to be manually generated. In Google Earth you just plug in places and it does all that hoopla for you. You could at least load kml files into world WW and that worked okay but placemarks would be tiny and the track would sometimes display funny. World Wind tended to record differently in Fraps as well. After the animated captures were made, they were imported to the project, sped up or slowed down as needed.

CC

Awesome info Carl, thanks again.

If anyone gets into putting 3D maps in their videos, let me know and we can talk about animating tracks in the footage.

CC