Making a Movie for the Internet
The Internet is in a state of constant change when it comes to multimedia publishing. One has to put up with some of the frustration and confusion that goes along with a constant state of flux. The following discussion outlines some of the process and tools I used to make the movie.
Video Capture
There are lots of video capture cards available now. In fact some newer camcorders that shoot digital video natively can export their data directly to the computer using the new "Firewire" connection. Since I have a Hi-8 camcorder (not digital), I bought the Pinnacle DC30 capture card for PC/Windows. It takes analog video from the camcorder and digitizes it into a selectable format on the PC. I usually digitize at the highest resolution (704 x 480 pixels) and with maximum quality. This translates into more then 7mb per sec of transfer rate. Do the math. This creates gigabyte size files in less then two minutes. I have two 18gig hard drives and I have completely filled them up with video in the past. Also, 7mb per sec means you must have SCSI ultra-wide drives (most home computers are IDE). They are more expensive but presently they are one of the only ways of getting that kind of data rate.
Video Editing
I use Adobe Premiere 5.1c video editing software. It came with the Pinnacle capture card and is considered the standard for computer video editing. Just to clue you in to a few buzzwords....The old style of video editing used for 40years by the TV and video industry is called 'linear editing'. It usually involves one or more video sources that are combined by a mixing board and output in a 'linear' fashion to a tape deck. The computer has allowed 'non-linear' editing. You can dump all of your scenes to disk and then arrange them any way you want and when you are finished it can go out to a tape deck (or other digital media).
Here is a picture of the Adobe screen with the actual 'Compache' project shown. Click on it if you want to see a larger version.
Most of the work is done at the bottom on the Timeline. Once again you click on the picture to see the a larger version.
The timeline contains video tracks (toward top) and audio tracks (green ones at the bottom). I generally use two video tracks. The blue boxes in-between the video tracks are transitions. Premiere has about a gazillion transitions that can be used, but I tend to use just fade outs, cuts and dissolves 99.999% of the time. If you have ever seen someone's video who actually insists on using 'page peels', 'swirls', etc. between scenes, you will see why just dissolves and cuts are best.
It is difficult to show on here, but you can click on each clip and add other effects like color corrections, sharpening, stabilization, deinterlacing, etc. You can also stretch out a clip to create slow motion. That is what I did for the rocket firing sequences.
On the audio tracks you can adjust the volume by moving the endpoints and midpoints (or making more) of the red lines running through the track. You can see how the audio is faded in and out. Also, other audio tracks with music (wav files) can be added too.
Outputting the Final Product
This is the part that caused me the most grief and time. Darn it, there seems to be endless video 'standards' for digital media. One of the most common is the AVI file. Microsoft seems to be the keeper of the AVI file but within an AVI file there can be different standards too. The compression algorithm within the file is called a 'codec'. There are lot's of different codecs available and your computer may have some or all of them depending on whether it is Windows 95, 98x or 2000 as well as when you bought it or what software you have loaded.
If you open up the Multimedia icon in the Control Panel and click on Video you will see something like this:
I tried what appeared to me to be the most advanced codec which is Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec v3 to create a final AVI file. I wound up with a file about 6mb in size. When I tried playing the AVI file on a different computer, Windows Media Player said it did not have the proper codec. It then connected itself to the Internet, went to the Microsoft site and downloaded the proper codec. After all of that work it then said there was an error and I should either restart Media Player or reboot the computer. I rebooted. Afterward it failed again. I tried it again at my computer at work and got the same problem. I decided that Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec v3 was not the way to go.
I tried several other file codecs and formats and all of them had one problem or another. Usually it was related to quality and size. It seemed impossible to get the file down to a reasonable size and with sufficient quality.
Then I looked at Mpeg. Premiere doesn't output Mpeg natively but I found an AVI to Mpeg converter on the Internet. What a difference. The guy that wrote it recommended that the original AVI file be uncompressed. So I output an uncompressed AVI file from Premiere that was 150mb in size. Remember this is 320 by 240 pixels at 30 frames per sec and only 21 secs. 150mb! Anyway I ran it through his converter an created a .mpg file that was less then 3mb and had the best quality of all of the previous bloated attempts with AVI files, etc.
Finally
There is some other technology floating down the pipe that might be useful. Microsoft and RealNetworks are competing for the streaming video and audio standards. Geocities that hosts this site support the RealNetworks streaming media. I will try to set it up in the near future to see how it works. My preliminary tests have shown that it allows a lot of compression for long clips but at low quality.
If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to email me at monsenrm@yahoo.com