Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Video Making Quest

I've been plotting to have what I've been referring to as an "elaborate slide show video" for sharing my thoughts both before and after seeing Princess Bride. My scheme was to put it all together in Flash and convert it to an appropriate format for Blip.

I'm used to Flash and don't have much else in the way of editing software, so this seemed like a good idea, but I've made a dramatic discovery: Flash + sound + movie export apparently = disaster.* It's not like I was working with terribly good sound quality to begin with, so it's a pretty significant issue.

As such, I'm downloading a 30-day trial of Adobe Premiere Elements. I figure, you know, April is long enough to figure out whether I'll be making more videos and if the program is worth my while to own.

I'm not jumping right into the Princess Bride video, however. I've made some art for it already, but I'm starting off with a cheesy 45 second "How To Draw A Dragon" video. Yes, I know Strong Bad's done it, but the point isn't to make an awesome video, but rather to work out a process and get technical feedback.

I'm not sure when that'll be done, but I'm hoping soon. I had actually predicted today prior to discovering the Flash sound issue, so it's pretty much going to boil down to how quickly I adapt to the new program and get sound results that don't burn my ears. Considering the conditions I recorded under (screw you, ice cream truck!) and the equipment used, the sound quality is actually pretty decent and lacking in background noise. Pretty much any loss of quality. however, tips the scale towards horrible. I'm hoping Elements can preserve it better, or even improve it.

In conclusion, I officially declare the last week of March to be "Dragon Week" for this blog, as this is the fourth post in a row having something to do with dragons and it's getting somewhat ridiculous.

* EDIT: Yeah, I should've tried .avi instead of .mov. The .avi files are huge, but I can reduce them down and change the format easily. So the real conclusion is that I was being stupid and I should definitely have the dragon test video done this week ^^;

5 comments:

  1. good luck, as for the editing software if your on a windows system it should come shipped with windows movie maker, it's usually considered to be worse than adobe premier but it's bundled with windows free. (look in the windows live folder in the start/all programs on most systems)

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  2. I was about to say "but Windows Movie Maker can't read .mov files!", but then I asked myself why I wasn't trying other video formats and reopened Flash.

    If I export it as an .avi file, the sound is okay. A problem is that 45 seconds is 897 MB, but that becomes less than 3 MB after being converted to an MP4 in Adobe's media encoder.

    So, huh. I may not need Premiere after all. So long as I've got the hard drive space for it and my system can handle such big files, I think I can get by with what I've got. I should probably still try Premiere, but this reduces the need to start up the thirty day trial.

    Well, that didn't take long. Where was this line of thought last night?!

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  3. See, I would have never thought to use a different video format either. So don't feel so bad. I mean I would have figured there is no difference.

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  4. I’m not huge into flash myself, however I have used my fair share of Video/audio editing tools.
    Mp4, Mov, Flv, Avi, mpeng, Ogv, Wmv, Mkv…. Are container types they have very little to do with the content actually in them an .AVI can be just as small and just as high quality as an .Mp4 file you just need to use the right codec settings.
    Infect if you wish to avoid losing quality between transcode “Container” type you need to make sure the codecs used match up. Just like Images converting from lossy to lossy = lossyer. Expect there is no true-losses type expect (Raw, and it gets HUGE fast) in video so every time you transcode Containers you will have loss. To use sites like Youtube or Blip you should export with the h.264 codec using the Flv, Mp2 or, Mp4 Container type using Mp3 audio codec, (Note#2: Audio and video uses different codecs make sure there set right. Don’t go Transcoding Lossy mp3 to lossy AAC )
    Sense blip does not have much of a This is what you should use case I’ll use You Tubes:

    You Tube:
    Resolution: Recommended: Original resolution of your video - for HD it is 1920x1080 (1080p) or 1280 x 720.
    Frame rate: The frame rate of the original video
    Codec: H.264 or MPEG-2 preferred.
    Preferred containers: FLV, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4
    Audio: Codec MP3 or AAC preferred
    Sampling rate 44.1kHz
    Channels 2 (stereo)

    If it were Me I’d use .Flv using the H.264 codec (Video), Mp3 (Aduio)
    Setup Video: 1920x1080, Frame rate (29.97), Bit rate 1500+
    Audio: 44.1Khz, Stereo, 320Kbps (192Kbps should be the lowest you use, for good quality.) (I like good audio what can I say? Most of my music is Flac or Ogg I don’t for the Life of me know why they can’t make a good steaming codec that uses Ogg so much nicer then mp3. I mean really MKV… MKV is a good container it should really be supported more.)

    The above would give you the best quality web videos that will down-sample well (The Media server Youtube/blip…etc will re-transcode the video any ways, in this case thou the minimum amount of loss will happen, and views will get all SD/HR/HD Options)

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  5. P/s: Sorry about all the spelling errors; I haven't eaten lunch yet and I think it's starting to catch up with me. XD

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