Video Smorgasbord
Finally ready to dive into my traveldoc video editing project. I’ve never done any digital video editing before, so this is an exploration into existing technologies as well as skill training - learning the tips and tricks to make things work, the pedagogy of metaphor shear in the computer age, the problem of grasping the non-intuitive.
Discovered that Pinnacle Studio 7 SE came packaged with my Presario 1720 (love my baby) way back in 2001. I replaced the hard drive a couple days back and the thing has been purring like 花 ever since, faster, so quiet and cool. The operation entailed reinstalling Windows XP from the recovery disks also packaged with my laptop. Disk partioning, crashes, service pack failures, were and continue to be the order of the day. Problems on tap will be ranted about another time. PS7 on first glance seems quite user friendly. I enjoyed the flash-based tutorial which guided me through some of the basic operations involved in video editing.
Reviews on the internet seem less stellar. There are plenty of people bitching about how it crashes, hangs, or doesn’t have this or that functionality. I can concur on every point:
- It crashed when I tried to open an AVI file with a non-standard resolution. (However the application of an update it automatically notified me of seemed to resolve the problem.)
- It hangs (or at least takes forever) importing photos.
- I had to go searching for other appliances for tasks such as rotating movies shot in portrait mode and using a custom background color (letterbox black, for god’s sake; PS7’s default is gray).
The user interface is straightforward and clean, which I like. I don’t like how the program installation takes up more than 500MB on my hard drive though.
I used VirtualDub to rotate portait mode movies. It’s open source under the GPL license, so of course I’m a fan. After opening the video file, I had to add some filters under the Video > Filters dialog in the following order:
- rotate spins the video around
- null transform preserves information in the original video so that the resolution, aspect ratio, etc. won’t change
- resize with the Expand frame and letterbox image option selected allows us to convert the aspect ratio of the clip back to a standard ratio
In the resize step New width and New height are the dimensions of the rotated video, while Frame width and Frame height are the dimensions of the letterboxed video. In my case, the original unrotated video was 320×240, with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Rotated, it became 240×320. To maintain the aspect ratio without cropping the video, I set the frame dimensions to 427×320. And of course PS7 crashed when I tried to import the sucker.
I’m planning to use Slide Show Movie Maker to convert my travel photos into a slideshow AVI I can then use in PS7. SSMM is freeware which combined with the open source XviD codec for Windows creates compressed AVI slideshows. SSMM is certainly very capable, although it is a bit buggy and has crashed on me a few times already. To test it I simply invoked the My First Video wizard, which guided me through the creation process. Processing takes quite some time and image organization isn’t even close to as intuitive as in PS7, but I don’t want to see gray in my letterboxes, period!
Wow, that was boring! I’m ready to start this thing though, so I’m starting to get excited! Amateur indeed!