DV for Teachers

At Streamingmedia.com, Jan gives a thorough and authoritative review, and gives it very high marks on compression quality, ease of use, and speed increases.

How did I miss this one? Busy doing other things and reading other places on the web, I suppose. I just found DV Guru, and it’s full of tips, workflow ideas, links to new products, and industry assessments. Another site to check every day, and worth it. For one example, they link to FilmSite.org, Tim Dirks’ huge site with historical timelines, synopses of classic films, and much more. It’s been around for ten years! An excellent augmentation for any film studies class. Beware the pop-up ads, though. Tsk.

Here’s another example: a post about the importance of integrating your audio with your video edits. For some of us, it’s a no-brainer, but not everyone picks that up. DV Guru offers good info for experienced editors and newbies too, and a busy comments section to boot.

Flip4Mac, the folks who made it possible for Windows Media video to play on Macs in the QuickTime player, now offer the Episode media encoder, with a wide variety of input and output formats, with a standard version at $395 and Pro version for $895. See the website for details.

Qualified education customers can apply for a 20% academic discount.

John Virata reviews the Movavi VideoSuite, and it seems like a very flexible tool for basic editing and for converting files to many many different formats, including PSP, iPod, mobile phones, even QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG, and Real. (Why would you want to put anything in Real format? But that’s another discussion.) I don’t know if it will rip encrypted DVDs; I doubt it, but wrote to Movavi and hope to find out.

I often used to link to Charles Wiltgen’s PlaybackTime, but he stopped posting more than three years ago. Thanks to a post here at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I found out he’s back, and has been since January. And it’s nice to find him as ornery and well-informed as ever in his response to a Cory Doctorow piece against Apple’s DRM in iTunes.

SimpleMovieX : Mac OS X Movie Editor: “The Happy QuickTime Pro Replacement that Does MPEG” says the site. MPEG import and export would be so useful.

The elusive multi-device video format at bioneural.net

So here is the challenge: What combination of video codec, audio codec, and container will produce a video (with sound) that can be played back on a Mac, a Windows PC, a Palm, a Pocket PC, and an iPod?… Was that an artery I just burst?

I’m still looking too… though this article explains beautifully several encoding processes that work on most of those platforms, but not on all of them at the same time. Bookmark this one if you produce compressed video on the Mac for different platforms.

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.

VisualHub allows you to convert video files to one of 9 formats in as little as three steps.

I tried the demo, and it does something I’ve seen in no other cheap/free tool: export right from a VIDEO_TS folder (the format of the video on a non-copy-protected DVD) to MPEG1, a format that plays well on all platforms, all video players, and – an especially popular feature here – plays beautifully in a Microsoft PowerPoint slide without having to link to another application. It’s $23.32 shareware. Very impressive.

(I love this warning on the “Advanced Settings” window.)

Larry Jordan is an experienced and respected Final Cut Pro editor and trainer. I subscribe to and keep his newsletters every month. They’re valuable reference materials for some of the editing situations I get into, and good refreshers when I return to editing after having been involved in other activities here in the ITC. His latest newsletter includes many tips and workflow examples, responses to reader questions, and explanations regarding working with other applications – motion graphics, audio, and more. Very highly recommended.

[Note: If you want to keep a copy, download it now; he doesn’t archive them on the site, he incorporates the contents into the articles there.] Here’s an extended excerpt about HDV’s strengths and limitations and his suggestions for getting the best results with this very much in-flux format.

Article: What I’ve learned about HDV

• The HDV image is 1440×1080, which does not precisely match either the 720p or 1080i format.
• HDV is enormously compressed, creating the possibility of significant motion artifacts when the camera is moved, or zoomed, quickly. HDV uses MPEG-2 compression, the same as a DVD.
• This compression groups several pictures into a “group of pictures,” called a GOP, rather than each picture being it’s own entity. 1080i HD groups 15 images into one GOP. 720p groups 6 images into one GOP.
• This GOP method of compression means that HDV is not accurate for timecode or frames when capturing or outputting. (Editing HDV inside FCP is frame-accurate, however.)
• HDV uses extreme color sampling, resulting in very, very poor color keying, color correction, or compositing results. (HDV uses 4:2:0 color sampling, the same as a DVD. Here’s an article that explains it in more detail.)
• HDV renders take about six times longer than DV. This is actually a result of rendering the larger HD image, versus an SD image; still, this will take longer than you expect.
• HDV needs to be conformed, or rebuilt, into a consistent GOP structure before it can be output to tape or exported to a file. This conforming can take an exceedingly long time. (For instance, conforming a 30 second sequence consisting of five shots, took over 10 minutes on my PowerBook. Conforming a complex hour-long sequence could take several hours on a G-5.)
• HDV can only use Print to Tape, not Edit to Tape, due to the timecode inaccuracies of HDV.

  For these reasons, I am no longer the fan of HDV that I used to be. What I’ve discovered is that we need to separate how we CAPTURE the image from how we EDIT the image.

SmartHouse News offers How To Turn Your Mac Into A Home Theatre System, 7 pages of links to multimedia software, much of it free, for using a Mac to control, store, and playback recordings for a home theater system. They provide little in the way of how-tos, but there are many apps here I was unaware of. For example, programs that work with TiVo® or other hard-drive-based digital video recorder devices. Lots here.

Why on DV for Teachers? Why not? An inexpensive set of choices for bringing more kinds of media to the classroom is a good thing, especially when it puts the power of choice in your hands.