In the first little tutorial we dealt with step one: getting some video editing software. In step two we will now gather the various audio and visual elements to be assembled into our video.
Getting Started in Video
1. Get a video editing program2. Gather your content elements
3. Put the elements together
4. Essay: The Art of Kinestasis
5. Compile the video
6. Publish!
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First Gather Your Video Content Elements
In this section we must necessarily go over the subject of video and audio
formats, for in gathering our content elements (audio and video) we will be meeting up with various formats of both kinds of content.
A video
format is simply a particular mathematical system by which a series of pictures (film, video) is
digitized into a stream of numbers - which is then saved as a video file (of numbers). When the file is played by a video player this stream of numbers will be turned back into a stream of pictures, a video. Video formats are also called "codecs," referring to the specific computer code they use to digitize and un-digitize video.
Luckily we don't have to know anything about the computer does all that, the programmer's have figured it all out and we don't need to know the details. But we do need to know
which are the main video and audio formats themselves since we will be dealing with different ones at various times.
All formats involve some kind of
compression of data as well. Pure audio-visual material contains huge amounts of data so various tricks are used to sqeeze the data down to reasonable file sizes and then unsqueeze it back when it is played. For example, movies on a DVD are highly compressed from their
film original and that system of compression (its format) is called
MPEG-2.
Quick Review of Video Formats
Like all kinds of other files, the type of video file format we are dealing with is indicated by the last three or four letters of the file name, the file "extension" or that part of the file name which comes after the last dot (.) Just as Filename.txt designates that the file is a text file and SomePic.jpg designates a JPEG picture file, the filename extenstions designate what particular video format a video file contains. Here are some of the main ones; in no time at all you will know these by heart.
1 .AVI - This was one of the very first and stands for "audio-video-interleave," invented by Microsoft in the beginning of PCs. As the name suggests it was a coding method by which video data would be interleaved with the sound data to produce a steady stream of audio-visual content. When writing such a file first a bit of the pictures are written, then a bit of sound, then more picture, more sound, and so on. It is calculated in a way that the result is a smooth stream of picture and sound that is perfectly in synch.
The AVI format has developed all along to include many different resolutions, meaning the number of pixels in each frame, such as 320x240 (small) or 640x480 (larger) or even 800x600 (large). The higher the resolution, the crisper and clearer the image.
On the Adobe Premier editing program that I use there is even an AVI format called Microsoft DV which creates
spectacular quality equivalent to professional "D1" format used in broadcasting. But these video files are HUGE! They are mainly for achiving and from which more compressed copies will be made according to intended use.
2 .MOV - Quicktime format
Quicktime Movie (MOV) format was developed by Apple for its MacIntosh computers. This format can be played on Windows machines by downloading a free player from Apple. The MOV format seems equivalent to the AVI format. It's an Apple thing.
3 .MPEG-1 and .MPEG-2 - This stands for the
Moving Pictures Experts Group. It was invented before the DVD technology came out to develop a new way of compressing videos to get the very best quality possible for a 2 hour file onto a 4.7 gigabyte plastic disc. MPEG-2 is thus often referred to as "DVD Quality." The interesting thing they did was to have two types of frames: one type was a full picture, and then there followed a number of frames which were data
only for the differences between that reference frame and the current frame. It turned out that the data only for what changed was much less data than a whole new full picture. So MPEG and DVDs were born.
So if you make a video in any format and then burn that video to disk to make a playable DVD, your burning program will be converting your video to MPEG-2 as it does so.
NOTE ON A PROBLEM: MPEG video can be a real bitch to edit directly. Since it uses two types of frames, an "I-Frame" which is an actual picture and a "P-frame" (predictive) which is data about the difference with regard to the I-Frame, how do I make a cut in the middle of a bunch of P-frames? These, in a sense, are not "real" frames but data for calculating a frame. When I first tried it in Premiere it was a mess; in particular the sound got all out of synch with the picture. I found out that I had to buy a whole separate Premiere Plugin specially made to allow ordinary editing of MPEG files. Wonderfully, the plugin worked great.
4 .WMV This is Windows Media Video format and was developed by Microsoft especially for showing video content over the Internet. It has the streaming capability we have all come to know and love. It downloads the beginning chunk of the data and starts playing it, and keeps downloading more while it is playing.
Like most of these video formats there are settings you can set when you make one that affect picture quality, sound quality, and (thus) file size. You can even make a WMV movie which will play on a dialup phone line, but of necessity it looks pretty crappy.
5. MPEG-4 This is basically a "wrapper" format developed by the
Motion Picture Experts Group especially for video on the Internet. A wrapper is a bunch of data which basically tells the video player HOW to play the video content it contains. Thus an MPEG-4 video could actually be an AVI file wrapped in the MPEG4 wrapper. So MPEG4 is very versatile since the wrapper contains instructions about what to do with the content. It is becoming popular via cell phones and iPods and other new devices.
6. RealAudio or
RealMedia - This is a horrible and evil codec which I have banned from my life forever. I am saying that not because the codec is bad, but because the company that created it did some terrible things at one point and that company became the most hated company on the Internet. I have even seen web pages which stated just that in surveys. There's a whole history there.
I guess some "bright" moron in that company got megamanical and decided the RealAudio codec would take over the world and become the greatest codec of all time. Must have had dollar signs flashing in his eyes. So they designed an installation system for their player which tried to take over your computer completely, insinuating itself into the operating system so deeply that it was nearly impossible for an ordinary person to ever get rid of it. If you uninstalled it, later it came back like some evil vampire rising from some hidden coffin. I don't know how deeply sinister their original motives were but people started complaining from all over the world and whole web pages began appearing which detailed the long and geeky complicated instructions for achieving final and ultimate removal of RealMedia from your machine. Never have I seen a company so totally shoot itself in the foot. It's too bad because they were the first ones who developed streaming video that I know of, and then they blew it by never once considering or caring about the user's point of view, that the user didn't want to be raped and invaded permanently by their software. We can all learn from their terrible mistakes. I think later they realized everyone hated them and tried to fix it, but the damage was done.
Wikipedia says:
RealPlayer has been quite controversial due to RealNetworks' reputation for invasive advertising and hard-sell tactics.[1] Some people refuse to use RealPlayer and have sought alternative means of playing RealVideo content.
It was so bad that various programmers cracked their format and wrote alternate RealMedia players that were simple dignified stand alone players without all the RealMedia company's malware. Here's one you can get if you want to play RealMedia files:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm
I haven't seen too many sites that still use RealMedia, most have switched to Window Media Video (WMV). In any case, most video editors will not even import RealMedia.
7.
MJPEG, or Motion JPEG, is another format which uses the familiar JPG picture compression method to create a stream of pictures. I've never used or come across this format.
There are many other formats or codecs for video but the ones above are the main ones we will come across as we begin to gather elements for making videos.
A more complete list of codecs is here at Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs
Sound! Quick Review of Sound Formats
In gathering sound sources for our video we again come up against a number of formats for sound files. Again the format of a sound file in indicated by the extension in the file name, the letters coming after the dot. There are just a few of these to worry about and most people know them already.
1 .WAV is another Microsoft creation and stands for waveform audio format. It is almost always used
uncompressed and so it is high quality (better than MP3) and can be edited easily. You would always want to use a WAV file in your video rather than an MP3 if you had a choice, although MP3 works well too. WAV files are CD quality.
2. AIFF - Audio Interchange File Format is the Apple equivalent of MS's WAV format. Like WAV it is a "lossless" codec meaning uncompressed and high quality.
3 MP3 - This is the sound format the whole world has grown to know and love. It is a compression codec, so a certain amount of data is thrown out to make the file smaller, about 10 times smaller. However the codec throws out data that doesn't make much difference, like the very high frequencies which most people can't hear anyway.
There are two other audio formats that we should know about, especially since they are likely to keep gaining favor in the future. They are free open source replacements for the WAV (uncompressed) and MP3 (compressed) formats. The problem arose because MP3 format is a patented OWNED proprietary format and the company that owns it (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) often makes a stink about wanting royalties from companies using that format. WAV is also proprietary to Microsoft, though I never heard of them making a stink. The People's Hackers got going and invented free open source versions:
4 OGG is an alternative to MP3, so screw you Fraunhofer Gesellschaft! OGG is the file extension of these files while the proper name of the codec is "Ogg Vorbis." Vorbis is the actual codec, and Ogg is wrapper around the data. No patents, no royalties, free to all.
5. FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec is a free open source replacement for Microsoft's WAV format and Apple's AIFF format. Both FLAC and OGG are responses to the attitudes of big corporations in thinking that they can OWN formats and thus make endless money every time someone uses them. Hats off to the hackers!
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Gathering Content for your Video
Now that we understand the main formats of video and audio we can start searching for the content we will weave together to make our video.
I have not spoken about a third type of content, still pictures, because those formats are fairly well known (BMP, JPG, GIF, Photoshop (PSD), and we all know how to download pictures and put them in a folder (or directory). In fact, most of my own videos I make
entirely from still pictures in a technique called "kinestasis" or
making still pictures move. ("Kine" = movement and "Stasis" = non-moving). In part 4 of this tutorial I will talk about the art of kinestasis and how to make a dynamic moving video using still pictures alone.
Let's think about sources for making your video. Here are some:
1. Your own video camera
2. Your web cam
3. From the TV
4. From the Internet
5. Your own scanned pictures
6. Words
7. Music from CDs
8. Voice-overs
Once you start looking or start a video project other possibilities will occur to you.
1. Your own videos
Video cameras have become ubiquitous (though I still don't have one). To use your own video content you will need a fairly large hard disk and a video card that can capture video input. You will probably also want to have a DVD writer so that you can offload completed projects to DVD when your disk starts to fill up.
I have an ATI "All-In-Wonder" video card that can transfer any video to hard disk MPG files and also has a TV tuner so I can record television to disk too. Because this has always worked fine I'm not too knowledgeable about other ways to capture video. Newer machines may automatically be able to do this through a USB port, I'm not sure. But a separate video card is a good thing to have if you will be doing video. Such cards have extra memory and chips dedicated to fast video so you will have smooth flow on your screen. Prices have come down a lot.
When you start a video project, be sure to make a separate folder to hold all the elements together, and make this a subdirectory rather than a directory in the root. That is, you could make a folder C:\MyVideos and then start your first project in C:\MyVideos\MyNervousBreakdown, or something, whatever it is about. Keeping all the elements of your project in one folder will be very helpful after it is done and you want to archive it to a DVD or CDs to clear some new disk space; all the files needed to restore it will be in one place.
2. Your web cam
If you don't have a video camera perhaps you have a webcam. These have gotten better and most software that comes with them allows you to record video to the disk. Many of the interesting YouTube videos are just a guy or girl talking into a webcam in an appealing way.
3. From the TV
Some video cards like my ATI 9600 have a TV tuner built in so that you can grab content right off your cable connection directly. I believe you can now also get little tuners that plug into your USB port for the same purpose. Another way is to run a cable from your TV's composite output jacks into the input jacks of your video card. You will need a program to perform the capture to disk, of which there are now many, one of which will come with the video card. Of course you can do the same thing with a VCR as the source instead of the television.
The programs which capture the video signal will have various settings for resolution and quality. If you are making a video for a website like YouTube or NewsNet7 a resolution of 320x240 will be adequate. For a more professional video you will want to go to 640 x 480, which is approximately full (standard) television resolution.
4. From DVDs
DVDs are another possible source for elements for your video. For example, you might want to make a video that was a movie review, your own Siskel and Ebert program, in which you would talk about the movie while showing clips from the movie itself, or compare some movies with clips from them all. "Greatest Love Scenes of Joan Crawford" or something like that.
How to get the DVD content onto the disk? I can give a few tips and point you to some free programs, although this is a little more technical than I intended to get.
A. Decrypt the whole DVD to disk
DVDDecrypter is the classic program for ripping DVDs to hard disk. It's a little baffling at first but it works great and you can get it here:
DVDDecrypter
http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/
It's also available at about a thousand other sites. It was made possible by young hacker from Norway who cracked the encryption code used on DVDs and then uploaded the code for doing so on the Internet.
After ripping the DVD what you will get is a directory containing "VOB" files, which are the movie. These are basically MPG-2 files with a "VOB" extension. Usually you can rename them with a "MPG" extension and treat them like MPEG files.
There is a site called " Doom9
" which is the ultimate site for DVD ripping and has all kinds of instructions for the above process, and also links to other great software which do things like shrink a movie down to a size that you can put on a CD. Click the "Download" link at Doom9 to see the software available.
B. Decrypt just a part of the DVD to disk
If you just want a portion of a DVD, some clips, then
Chopper is the best way to go, although I haven't used it yet. It lets you put in a DVD, then scroll to the scene you want, mark it (in point, out point) then just extract that part.
Here's the download link:
http://www.inchwest.com/digital-miner.com/software/chopperxp.zip
5. From the Internet
Of course the Internet is now the greatest source of all for collecting video material to play with in your video editing program. Every single day there is more and more material available. Search for it, find it, download it and start editing!
YouTube and GoogleVideo are the obvious places to start. There is a slight problem here, but it has a solution. What you download from these sites is actually a Flash file (Shockwave) with an extension "FLV." This is actually a Flash wrapper file around the embedded video file and you have to extract the video file (usually an AVI) before you can load it into your video editor. Programs exist to do this. The best one I have found is called SUPER, which converts FLV files to almost any other format. See the Conversions section below.
Some other sources for video material:
Archive.org is a great site with tons of video material including lots of old feature movies that have fallen into the public domain. Here's the link for the "Moving Pictures" section:
http://www.archive.org/details/movies
You can spend a whole day just browsing through all the stuff there. Thumbnails show sample frames from the movies, and most of the material allows you to select from several levels of quality (and file size) up to DVD quality.
Library of Congress
Lots of stuff here, especially old and historical stuff including some of the earliest films ever made. Like most government sites it is rather chaotically arranged so you may have to search around a bit. I seem never to be able to get back to a page I remember seeing before.
Here's some pages to start with:
Really Old Film Clips
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/ndlmps.html
This
LINK SEARCHES
the Library for "film"
Photographs
Sound files
Stage6
This is a site that specializes in DivX format video stuff. DivX is a great format that almost as good as MPEG-2 in quality but is compressed much more to a smaller file size. You can download any video file here, but your editing program may not import it, in which case you will need a conversion program to make it editable. See below.
Bittorrent
The bittorrent program is all the rage now. It is a peer-to-peer file sharing system and tons of video content is available. Here are the steps to find video content with Bittorrent:
A. Download a bittorrent client program which will do the downloading.
The most used ones are the
original Bittorrent program ,
MuTorrent (my fave),
BitComet , and
Azureus .
B. Go to a torrent search site and find a "torrent"
At these sites you will find "torrents" files which are instructions to the client program for downloading a video file. You will download the "torrent" file of the video file you want.
The most popular torrent search sites are
BtJunkie ,
Minova ,
Isohunt , and the notorious
PirateBay .
C. Load the torrent into your client program. The file will start downloading.
6. Your own photographs
This is simple enough! With a digital camera you just transfer you photographs to your hard disk and import them into your video program. Paper photos or artwork must be scanned in with a scanner.
7. Words
Words or titles are another obvious element you may want to include in your video. Some video editing programs let you create titles on the spot. Often these can be made on a transparent background so that they show over some underlying video content. Another way to make titles is with a photo program like Photoshop or one of the free open source Photoshop clones. You will use the Text tool to create your title, save it in some picture format like BMP, then import that picture into your video editor.
8. Music from CDs
This is an obvious source for background music. Of course there's the copyright clearance issue but, hey, this is FOLK ART! What the hell. If you use more that a "fair use" clip it would be courteous to put a title card somewhere (beginning or end) with the proper original copyright notice.
9. Voice-overs
Of course your own voice narrating is a simple and powerful tool and very easy to do. Many freeware and open source programs will let you record from a microphone to disk. Windows comes with a simple one. Remember to turn off all humming motors like air conditioners and fans when you record, and close the window if there is traffic or other chaos outside.
The best open source sound editor program I know of is called Audacity. It will enable you to record your voice-over, and even add effect (like a touch of echo) to the result. You can get Audacity at SourceForge:
Audacity Free Sound Editor Program
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Well, that's should get you started on gathering source materials and elements for creating your own videos. Next time we will take up the topic of putting these kinds of elements together and talk about ideas for various kinds of projects.
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Conversions
Oh yes, there's that pesky little problem left over about extracting the video files from those damn FLV files at YouTube and GoogleVideo.
There are a number of programs that will do this but most of them are asking for various amounts of money.
However I found a great free video conversion program called SUPER which does it, as well as much much more. SUPER converts video files from almost any format to almost any other format, including converting FLV (Flash Video) files to AVI which are then easily editable and will load into your video editor.
It is at this rather maddening site:
http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html
I say maddening because the actual download links are buried in a weird way that makes you go through page after page of promotion until you can get to them. I always get lost there.
Hmmm... just tried it and got lost again. They have some weird kind of link that always makes you go through 3 pages to get to it again. It's there, but you have click through.
Note on this download... the file you want many megabytes but an error problem (explained in another buried place) says sometimes you get a file that is only a few K. If this happens they say that you should just try again until you get the actual big file. Some download problem quirk.
But it's a really great and handy program for anyone dealing with video files.
That's it until next time!
by billym
