Who's working with video?

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Treeline

Treeline

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I'm trying to find ways to integrate some of my stuff with a video project my wife has in mind and really don't know where to start. So I figure maybe a good place is to see how much videography activity there is amongst us. She's planning a documentary and has a few projects in mind beyond that but she'll have her hands full to begin with.

She has lined up classes and equipment training enough to get started, but one of the issues I'd like to be thinking of is whether any of my stuff (computer etc.) could be put to efficient dual use, or if that would only create limitations for her.

My DAW is a pretty standard AMD / ASUS setup, AMD 3000+ chip, just over 1.5 GHz but running as a 64 bit chip on a 939 socket board. I have a Gig of RAM and assorted onboard and remote disks. I just picked up a new DVD burner but have yet to install the driver. No video cameras right now; I'm thinking of getting a $500 range Canon or equivalent so she can put her lessons into practice from the getgo. The training is at a local television studio and access to equipment is all broadcast grade, so she'd be learning about handling big rigs as well as other stuff.

I'm using Adobe Audition 1.5 for audio (and a few other programs) and the Adobe film making package (Premier, I believe) looks pretty strong; it would interface with Audition and offer continuity between our projects; I could become more useful as an assistant to her if I could use my rig.

OTOH, Final Cut seems to be more commonly in use and requires an Apple platform.

So I'm at the head scratching stage with some time to think. I do believe that she will be able to get some funding due to the nature of at least one of her projects, as long as she is able to provide a decent demo with a grant application. So there may be a lot we can do to get the project going.

Any ideas / voices of experience? Thanks.

Tree
 
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I regulary work in audio and video myself, and Benny Chico also does sound for video. There are a few others as well that I don't recall the names of off-hand, but the numbr of videographers on this board is relatively small.

As far as using the computer for video, I highly recommed this, even more so than I would for pure audio. There is no substitute for A/V editing on the computer, and with the proper quality NLE software, excellent results can be had at prosumer DV resolution levels.

I personally curretly use Sony Vegas for 90% of my A/V editing needs and would highly recommend it. I also am a newly-purchased Nuendo owner, but I'm still on the learning curve of that software so I haven't used it much for my mainline production work yet. Frankly I have yet to find much of anything I can find that Nuendo does that Vegas won't on the video side of things.

I have used Adobe Premiere in the past (latest version for me was Premiere 6.x), but switched to Vegas for two main reasons; first, I found Premiere to be highly unstable on my PCs; there were a *lot* of annoying lock-ups and crashes, and second, I found the Vegas interface (screen design and layout) to be more logical and efficient for the way I work. That first stability problem may be old new; for all I know the current editions of Premiere may be just as robust as anything else, but it left such a bitter taste in my mouth a couple of years ago, and I have come to be so comfortable with Vegas that I have had no reason to go back. And the second issue is really just a subjective personal preference, I'm sure that there are those that find the Sony look and feel to be too utilitarian for their tastes and prefer the way Premiere handles, especially those who are used to the look and feel of legacy Mac software, which Premiere resembles to a great degree.

I use several software packages for my audio editing from Steinberg, Sony, Cakewalk (though the Cakewalk is pretty much just for legacy projects now) and Adobe, including Adobe Audition. The inter-linking of Audition and Premiere could be a nice selling point if execued well; I have similar linking between Vegas and Sound Forge, and it does come in handy for on-the-spot editing. However, I do much of my audio processing in audio packages other than Sound Forge; my multi-track mixing is usually done in Nuendo or Audition, and there is no software linking there. That, however, really does not hamper my workflow; It's no problem to just save my mixes as WAVs in one audio application, switch to Vegas on the task bar and then load, paste or drop the WAVs into the timeline or media bin in Vegas. The point here is, the linking of audio and video software from the same brand is a very handy feature, but it's not worth more than choosing the individual audio and video applications that work best for you. If you like Audition, but don't care for Premiere (or vice versa), don't stick with the one you don't like just for the brand and the linkage; use the apps you like best, moving media between different brands is not hard or bulky at all.

HTH,

G.
 
I work with video daily. I prefer a hardware solution, but I work on a lot of 1 to 3 hour programs. We also use a lot of short format suites, featuring Macs running Final Cut Pro. I tend to avoid Macs, but it does seem to be a sweet rig and seems to be popular with novices. At home, I have Premeire, but I seldom do stuff at home anymore. Another irritating thing about Macs, they come with a fairly capable piece of editing software, IMovie. And they are fairly stable video platform, few crashes or glitches. I still avoid them; they seem evil. :D
 
Oh, I forgot to add: Beware of the whole DVD burning arena, it can be a major pain in the ass if you try to push the technology, even if you have the best of gear. Except for the most basic hobby projects, consumer DVD creation technology is just not yet ready for prime time, IMHO. I can't tell you how many different brands of DVD creation software, brands of video compression software and DVD+R and DVD-R drink coasters I have gone through, even using a top-of-the-line Plextor drive with recommended A-list blank media with the results giving me nothing more than a migrain.

If you want to create a full 720x480 DV resolution video of anything longer than an hour in length, print it to DV tape, not to DVD (dual-layer DVD-Rs may help, but they have their own issues still.). If you need to go to DVD, then send your DV master (or your AVI files) to a pro company that will burn real glass DVDs instead of DVD+/-R.

On the other hand, I have been printing to Digital8 and MiniDV tape (from Premiere and Vegas) for something like 7 years now and have never had a single frame drop or other issue; printing to DV tape via Firewire is a golden technology that works well and works reliably :).

G.
 
i play at video, make videos for my band and stuff.
use final cut, i love it and find it to be very intuitive, but have little to compare it too.

advice
CAMERA- a 500$ camera is almost NO BETTER than a 300$ camera, seriously. you may get more ins and outs or simple stuff like that, but no improvement in video or audio quality worth mentioning.

3 1/6" ccd's are not really any better than one 1/3", as long as the camera's not a piece of crap in the first place. (actually in low light situations, a single 1/3 may actually be a little better.... but in good light (and by that i mean sunny day, not "good" indoor lighting) the 3X1/6 will be a little better)

OPTICAL IMAGE STABILAZATION, digital is a joke.

a digital 8 camera with a fire wire out will be cheaper than a miniDV camera, even if they are otherwise identical.
(i went with a mini DV though)

that's all i can think of at the moment.
 
Thanks you guys for this info. You're giving me a lot to chew on here and I appreciate it.
 
giraffe said:
3 1/6" ccd's are not really any better than one 1/3", as long as the camera's not a piece of crap in the first place. (actually in low light situations, a single 1/3 may actually be a little better.... but in good light (and by that i mean sunny day, not "good" indoor lighting) the 3X1/6 will be a little better)
Click to expand...

ok, wanted to elaborate on this a little
3X1/6 is really not better than 1X1/3 given that they are in the same price range......
 
giraffe said:
a digital 8 camera with a fire wire out will be cheaper than a miniDV camera, even if they are otherwise identical.
Click to expand...
This is very true. I did a wedding video a few months ago that included a 3-camera shoot of the ceremony. One camera was a 7 yr old Digital8 and the other two were newer MiniDVs a year or two old. I'd bet anybody watching the edited video that they couldn't tell which was which, and that's even though the CCDs on the MiniDVs were higher-resolution than on the old Digital8. Additionally, printing from the computer to D8 or MiniDV (where you're going through FW and not thorugh a CCD) is identical.

I will say, though, that it's getting harder and harder to find tapes and accessories for Digital8, and if you want to create tapes that will be compatable with what your friends and neighbors have, MiniDV is probably the way to go.

giraffe said:
OPTICAL IMAGE STABILAZATION, digital is a joke.
Click to expand...
Better yet, turn the stablization off altogether and build your own Steadycam rig for $14:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

G.
 
figure out the video part of everything first before you figure out the audio portion.
You need to decide what camera you are going to shoot on and what program you are going to edit video on. Then decide if you want to even both bringing the audio into another system.

Edit all the video first. Figure out the edits, color correction, effects, graphics, etc. Then you can easily make a Quicktime of it and then bring it over to the audio program (preferably by exporting an OMF). Sorry, I can't recommend any good video programs because I don't use them myself. At work, though, we mostly use Avid Adrenalins and Final Cut Pro. Also, take a look at the Avid Mojo....one of their cheaper all in one options. We have one for smaller projects.

MiniDV and DV are nice because a lot of them have firewire outputs. Although the quality isn't the greatest for films. I'm sure you've seen big film productions and small independent ones. There is a huge quality difference between the two. If you do have access to a camera at the TV studio, see if they'll let you work with Beta or Digital Beta...then of course there is HD, but I doubt they'll have that. We don't even have one in house, we contract out for that.

Sounds like the Premiere/Audition idea would be a good fit for you.
:)
 
I am just starting to get commercial video work doing corporate traing videos. I did a feature DV movie last year though. (the editing was outsourced)

I have edited video successfully on a 1.3Ghz Xeon with 512MBRAM with Windows Movie Maker

I currently shoot DTE (Direct to Edit) which is directly into the computer... on the movie we used an old Panasonic WV-F250 (3x 1/2" CCD) with a studio adapter into an analog to firewire converter into an iBook G4 into iMovie.

I hate Macs too :)

Now I am setting up a linux workstation to use the same equipment but capture into a Semptron 3000+ (2ghz) with 768MB RAM using Kino or Cinelerra.

I just got Cinelerra working this week... so I'm scrounging up an extra harddrive and going to be doing a lot of testing next week.

DTE is a lot of equipment to lug around so not appropriate for documentaries... but it has two main advantages

1. no tape transferrs... so no tape compression... would you rather have miniDV or DVCAM :) both are DV25

2. can be imported instantly into the editing software and scenes can be editied while shot... think George Lucas...
 
You also might checkout some of the Access Television Stations in your area. They vary in what they offer, but you might get a chance to play with some equipment before buying.

Vermont
Catamount Access TV Corporation
P.O. Box 4747
Bennington, VT 05201
Lisa DeAngelis
phone: (802) 442-8868
fax: (802)422-3122

Greater Northshire Access Television
P.O. Box 2168
Manchester Ctr, VT 05255
Garrett McCarey
phone: (802) 362-7070
fax: (802) 362-0018

Brattleboro Community TV
230 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
Michael Billingsley
Interim Administrator
phone: (802) 257-0888
fax: (802) 257-0888

Vermont Community Access Media
208 Flynn Ave, #2G
Burlington, VT 05401
Robert Chapman
phone: (802) 651-9651
fax: (802) 651-8679

Regional Educational Television Network, Inc.
P.O. Box 2386
South Burlington, VT 05407-2386
Scott Campitelli
phone: (802) 654-7980
fax: (802) 654-7984

Lake Champlain Access TV
Channel 15 &16
354 Prim Road, Suite 3
Colchester, VT 05446
Kevin Christopher
phone: (802) 862-5724
fax: (802) 864-6635

Middlebury Community Television
P O Box 785
Ilsley Library - Main Street
Middlebury, VT 05753
Richard Thodal
phone: (802) 388-3062
 
I'm using Final Cut Pro...I hate it for one reason alone...I'm forced to use a MAC. I really resent it. I've used AVID and simply find that the Final Cut application flows a little better for my purposes.

I spent WAY too F^(!n much money on that MAC) machine. Everything is an add-on. It's compatable with nothing and only does a few things for me. I'll say this though, what it does do (that sounds weird doesn't it) it does very well.

Sorry...my rant. I'm feeling much better now...really!
 
Guess I can put in my 2 cents.

I do on stage videos for bands to use for promotional package purposes as well as music videos out of my own studio. I use Premier Pro 7 daily and have no problems with it. I do almost all of the audio in the studio on a desktop or in the field with a laptop using Audition 1.5 because it integrates seamlessly with Premier.

The biggest factor in any of this is that it's really hard to do either really well on one machine together.

I have a desktop that is strictly set up for Audio and another strictly for video. They are networked for purposes of transferring audio files. The video machine is a 2.80 ghz P4 with 2 gig of ram which is almost a must to do video with a lot of editing. Hard drive size and speed are also a big factor. The audio machine is the same processor but only 1 gig of ram.

The Adobe Classroom books are excellant learning materials as the tutorials are designed to take a person from beginning to end of a complete project.

As for burning to DVD. I use Adobe Encore DVD for building motion menus, etc. after editing in Premier and marking chapters, you can export it all to Encore and build a chapter menu in minutes.

You'll save yourself a lot of headaches and heartaches if you get yourself a DV camera (even mini dv tape type) that's firewire capable. They can be had these days for $300.00 or even less since camera's with their own harddrives are now out. When you capture to computer, do it as AVI files for quicker editing in Premiere or Pinnacle or whatever and then get Encore or some other DVD building software that will transcode to MPEG before it burns. It's a lot faster that way.

As I said......just my 2 cents.....but it's worked for me on a daily basis for a couple years and many projects now. J.
 
You may already have the info you need, but I will tell you what i have anyways...We bought a Canon MiniDV camera pretty cheaply, and the video qulity is actually very nice...for under $400. If you save the files as avi, they are really crisp. I use Pinnacle to edit in, and it sems to work ok. Good transitions, fairly easy to navigate, and edit in. A very simple setup, and about $500 total. I am by no means doing what you may wish to do, but this simple setup works pretty slick from what I can tell.

Guess no real info, just some food for thought.
Ed
 
I have a Canon MiniDV camera (ZR-100) that I purchased for under $300. It's not the best, but it does a nice job and what I need right now.

I do all my video work in Final Cut Pro and iMovie (sometimes it's just easier to capture in iMovie).

I actually have a question, since we're on the topic:

Does anyone know a way to sync up video to some kind of rhythm? I have several tapes of old performances of my band, and would like to create music videos out of them with the album versions of the songs. Of course, in a live setting, no song is performed at the same tempo, and I can't figure out what to do about varying the speed of the "tapes" to get it right.
The best method I can think of is to do some kind of "tap track" where I tap the respective BPM of the album version, and do the same for each video track and get them to line up... Is it possible? I have no clue.
 
hmm... the only thing I can think of is to get ratios from the "tap tracks" and use that figure to determine the ammount of speeding up and slowing down is necessary...

example (bear in mind I'm a drummer so my math is probably wrong)

CD = 100bpm
video is at 98bpm

you would then need to speedup the video the extra 2% to get the speed to match better...

you do have about 11ms of "play" bofore someone will notice it being out of sync.

if you can't sync it then put on video of something else (aka cutaway)
 
I'm using Adobe Audition for audio, Adobe Premier for video editing and Adobe Encore for making of DVDs. All that just for fun.
Great software, by the way.
I just wish I had more time for all that stuff because I do something else profesionally. I'm going to make a DVD with my music and videos.
It could be take a least 5 years with this tempo but nobody is waiting for it anyway.
 
Alexbt said:
Does anyone know a way to sync up video to some kind of rhythm? I have several tapes of old performances of my band, and would like to create music videos out of them with the album versions of the songs. Is it possible? I have no clue.
Click to expand...
It sounds like you're talking analog audio a al old cassette or open reel tapes from other performances than what you have on your video. If so, what you're looking for is a really tall order. Unless you guys are virtual machines when playing your stuff, your analog tapes were recorded on A-list decks and stored in pristine condition, and you just happen to lead a more charmed life than I do, you can forget syncing more than a few seconds at a time, if that much.

Not only will the performances themselves be different, not just in tempo, but in the actual playing between the beats as well, but the playback speed of the tape can vary over the time of the song due to tape stretching over time and wow and flutter from the tape machines themselves.

Zek has it right in his last line that the best you can really hope for is to find a few seconds here and there that just happen to line up (like the winshield wipers in your car that go with the song on the radio for a few seconds) and fill the rest of the video with cutaways to the audience or other video clips.

If you really, really wanted to work on it on a frame by frame basis, you can acheive more results than that, but It'll take a LOT of work and it'll still not look great. When you only have 30 frames of video per second to play with, it doesn't take long when moving off that speed before speedups/slowdowns become artifacty and noticible.

G.
 
Uhh, sorta...

Video Source = Misc VHS, converted to MiniDV
Audio Source = CD/Album or new mix from source tracks (seems unnecessary)

The point of the project is to put out some kind of live-looking video (since the audio from the VHS tapes SUCK royally) to the audio of the album. It's impossible to actually shoot a video because the singer died.

So this is the next best thing... I'm pretty sure that it's possible to tap out the BPM of a song in order to vary the speed without changing pitch (a la DDR and other beat based games) but I don't know if that's possible with video as well. That's the kind of trick I'm going for.
 
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