Raw Content Creation (Camcorders)

Year 2002: A consumer-level analog camcorder (VHS-C, 8-mm, or hi8) is fine for recording home movies, but don't waste your money on one if you plan to use it for digital video production. If you already own an analog camcorder, there are ways of converting analog video to digital. See details in the Raw Content Creation (Camcorders) section. There are three entry-level digital camcorder formats. The oldest and most established is miniDV, and two more recent ones, both from Sony, are digital8 and MICROMV. Street prices range from about $500 for low-end consumer units to $4,000 plus for professional miniDV camcorders. The Canon XL1S miniDV camcorder was recently used by Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”, “Erin Brockovich”) to shoot “Full Frontal”, a movie about movies starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, which opened August 2, 2002. If you need help in deciding what to buy, maybe Raw Content Creation (Camcorders) can help.

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Transfer Raw Video to Computer

If your video is on miniDV tape: You will need an IEEE1394 (FireWire) PCI card for your desktop PC or a FireWire Cardbus card for your notebook PC. The advantage of using a notebook PC is that the Cardbus card is hot-swappable.  FireWire cards are very inexpensive; PCI versions can be purchased bundled with editing software (see Edit Digital Video below). Windows XP Professional natively recognizes (no software drivers from hardware manufacturers needed) FireWire cards.  Furthermore, when you connect the IEEE1394 output of your camcorder to the IEEE1394 input of your computer, Windows XP natively recognizes your camcorder. Also, if your internal hard drives do not have enough capacity for the temporary storage of the large digital files required during editing, Windows XP will natively recognize an external IEEE1394 hard drive. The FireWire bus is very fast (400 Mbps), and large-capacity FireWire hard drives are now fairly inexpensive. The same software that you use for editing (see below) controls the initial step of moving the miniDV data from the camcorder tape to a designated hard drive on your PC. Specific brands of FireWire cards and hard drives: See details in the Raw Video to Computer section.

If your video is on analog tape: If you have a miniDV camcorder or player, connect the output of a video player that handles your analog video format to your miniDV device in record mode. If you do not have a miniDV device, there are numerous ways to convert your analog video to digital video, but I’ll only mention my favorite one at this time (other options upon request). Buy or borrow the ADVC-100 Advanced DV Converter from Canopus (about $270 street price). Connect the VHS or S-video output of a video player that handles your analog video format to the corresponding input of the ADVC-100, connect the miniDV output of the ADVC-100 to the IEEE1394 input of your PC, and proceed as if your miniDV camcorder or player were connected to the PC. The beauty of the ADVC-100 is that it does not depend on the computing power of your PC to do the conversion to miniDV. Instead, the ADVC-100 has its own custom hardware Codec chip for this purpose. Your PC will think it is connected to a miniDV camcorder or player.

If your video is on old film such as 8mm or Super8 :  Run, don’t walk, to the nearest film transfer facility, before your old film deteriorates further. The cost of transfer to VHS tape, miniDV tape, or DVD is modest. You can find tape transfer businesses in your area by doing a Web search. There are several in Indianapolis, such as Memories to Movies and Movietime Video Productions.

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Edit Digital Video

There is a proliferation of inexpensive low-end (but adequate for entry-level work) software packages for digital video processing.  Each can capture footage from taped sources, edit the digital video, and convert it to assorted formats suitable for distribution. Windows XP installs a freebee, Windows Movie Maker. If you have never done digital video editing, start out with Movie Maker, then move up to Pinnacle Studio Version 8, and then (if more powerful post-production is needed) to a semi-professional software package such as Adobe Premiere 6.5, Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.5, or Discreet CineStream 3.1 (version numbers as of September 2002).

Microsoft does not provide printed documentation for Windows XP Movie Maker, but you can easily create your own user manual as follows:

Pinnacle Studio Version 8 costs $65 for the software alone, $92 for Pinnacle Studio DV Version 8, which includes a IEEE1394 PCI card, and $106 for Pinnacle Studio Mobile Version 8, which included a IEEE1394 CardBus card for notebook PCs (Indiana University contract prices at CDW×G).

Add Closed Captions

Captions can be used for the benefit of the hard of hearing, to create a quiet environment, and to provide information not given in the voice audio. There are two types of captions, open and closed.

Open captions are embedded in the video file itself, they are painted into the picture pixels. Open captions are created with the text creation tools of video editing or other software packages. After open captions are incorporated into the digital video file, they cannot be closed (turned off).

Closed captions were first developed for television, where they are hidden in the so-called vertical blanking interval (line 21) of the analog video signal; they are called closed because they are turned off unless a decoder turns them on. In digital video files for computers, closed captions are normally text files that are easily edited. The main vehicle for incorporating closed captions into digital video files is the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced “smile”). See the “Create Closed Captions” section.

For an example, see Moving Atoms, ABC Evening News, October 24 1997 (8.3 MB), with text and closed captions added by Adam Allerhand. The creation of this video clip has its own Step-By-Step section, Step-By Step: Creation of “Moving Atoms” Video Clip, where you can find some details about using the SMIL markup language to add closed captions and other text to a video clip.

Create Digital Video Without Using a Camcorder

Some teachers have created good instructional animation movies using Macromedia Director (Shockwave animations), Macromedia Flash, or other software tools. Some magnificent examples of educational Flash animations can be found at Nobel e-Museum, the official Web site of the Nobel Foundation. My favorite is the Blood Typing “game”, which teaches about blood groups, blood typing, and blood transfusions by having you be responsible for transfusions in a hospital emergency room, while giving you the opportunity to study pertinent science. This is a must-do (not must-see) interactive educational animation. Go to www.nobel.se/medicine/educational/landsteiner/index.html right now!

The new Flash MX goes beyond being a tool for creating animations; it incorporates the Sorenson Spark video codec to add major video creation capabilities to Flash. See the “Video Without a Camcorder” section.

An interesting new software tool is Camtasia from TechSmith. It captures and edits computer screen activity, thus creating instructional videos of software use. See the “Video Without a Camcorder” section.

NOTE: Beware of Web pages that violate etiquette by changing (without warning) the display characteristics on you computer, such as forcing a headache-inducing 60 Hz refresh rate, in order to accommodate outmoded animations.

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Prepare Digital Video for Distribution

When making decisions about formats for distribution, it is helpful to have a birds-eye understanding of formats and codecs. A format such as Apple QuickTime is a container (also called an architecture) for digital video. The digital video placed in the container has to be in compressed form, as explained below. There are a variety of compression/decompression algorithms (called codecs). QuickTime accepts some but not all of these codecs. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 containers accept only the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 codec, respectively. In this “nutshell” discussion, I will only discuss the RealVideo container and codecs, because Indiana University has a nice streaming RealVideo server. More on streaming in the next section of this page and in Place Digital Video on the Web. More examples of architectures and codecs in Prepare Digital Video for Distribution.

As a starting point, keep in mind that a digitized uncompressed one-second segment of standard television would require a transmission rate of about 200,000 Kbps and about 25 MB of disk storage. In the editing step described above, the software deliberately chooses a high-quality codec and a low compression ratio, which results in digital video that takes up a large amount of disk space. For example, the codec used by miniDV tape, called DV25, can also be used for digital video in a computer. It requires about 3.6 MB of disk space for every second of video, and a transmission rate of about 30,000 Kbps, beyond the capability of ordinary Internet networks. Therefore, the edited video needs to be saved in a format suitable for transmission needs.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft Movie Maker will not save your edited video in RealVideo format, but you can save it in one of the available formats and then use other software for converting to RealVideo. For example, you can use Helix Producer Basic (free), or Helix Producer Plus ($200) from RealNetworks. Click here for a comparison of the two versions.

Pinnacle Studio DV, Adobe Premiere and various other software products allow you to capture (transfer to computer), edit, and convert to RealVideo format using a single software product. But if you want the greatest control over the properties of the final digital video, specialized video conversion software products such as Cleaner from Discreet ($189 educational price at Genesis Technologies) and ProCoder from Canopus (expensive) should be considered.

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Place Digital Video on the Web

You have two choices, place your video clips in a folder of your Web site, or get permission to place it on a streaming video server.

Digital video from a Web server. At worst, 100% of a video file on a Web server will have to download before playing can begin. Some formats and players allow progressive download, also called HTTP streaming and fast-start (QuickTime jargon), which allows the viewer to watch the first portion of a movie before all of it has downloaded. The advantages of video on a Web server are: (1) You do not need access to special streaming video servers. (2) You may want to use a video format that does not allow true streaming.

Digital video from a streaming video server. True streaming is designed to provide real-time delivery of digital video over the Internet. If you are at Indiana University and you need to deliver high-quality video over the Internet then you should run, not walk, to implement this option, by means of the I. U. Digital Media Streaming Service, which has a RealVideo streaming server and a QuickTime streaming server. Click here to find out the requirements for the use of this service. I much prefer RealVideo streaming over QuickTime streaming. Find out why in the Place Digital Video on the Web section.

Place Digital Video on CDs and DVDs

I am not talking here about placing standard digital video files on recordable media for exclusive use on computers. I am talking about video discs such as the DVD movies that you buy or rent. You might wish to give your students an instructional disc that can be played in a DVD player or a computer.

There are too many DVD recordable flavors (DVD-R for Authoring, DVD-R for General, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, and the newest, DVD+R). It appears that DVD-R and DVD+R are in a struggle for dominance. For both formats, there are reports of incompatibilities with some DVD players, but this problem should disappear with newer DVD players. There are two ways you can record to DVD discs. You can use a DVD burner connected to a PC, such as the new Hewlett-Packard DVD200e (about $500 street price), an external DVD+R and DVD+RW unit that can be connected either to an IEEE1394 port or a USB 2.0 port; I will report my experience with this device on this Web site soon. Or you can choose the DVD equivalent of a VCR, a DVD recorder independent of a computer, such as the new Philips DVDR985 (street price about $800), which also records to DVD+R and DVD+RW. Prices are likely to drop sharply within a year. DVD+R media now sell for as little as $3.00.

There is a less expensive alternative to DVD. If you have a CD-R burner of recent vintage, consider the production of VideoCD (VCD) and Super VideoCD (SVCD). You will end up with video CDs that will play on most DVD players of recent vintage, at a cost per blank disc of about 50 cents.

What is the difference between the VCD and SVCD formats? An SVCD is similar to a video DVD, in that it uses the MPEG-2 format for video clips; it delivers high quality video at a typical bit rate of about 2,500 Kbps. However, because of the small capacity of a CD disc, you can only squeeze up to about 40 min of video on one disc. In order to create SVCD discs you need to process your digital video clips into the MPEG-2 format. Even inexpensive editing packages such as Pinnacle Studio Version 7 will do this. VCD discs use the lower-quality MPEG-1 format at a typical bit rate of 1,200 Kbps or less, but you end up with up to about 75 min of video on one disc.

You combine your MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 video clips into SVCD or VCD discs with the use of DVD authoring software. Unless you need sophisticated menus and other “professional” features, inexpensive DVD authoring programs such as ULEAD DVD MovieFactory ($40) will do the job. There are many other inexpensive low-end DVD authoring software packages, such as Pinnacle Express, mentioned above as part of the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe bundle.