Digital Video Puts You In Charge

by David Tenenbaum

For closet Clint Eastwoods and wanna-be Woody Allens, making real movies just became affordable. With digital video, you won't need to rob Altman to get in on the fun--if you already own a modern and high-horsepower Mac or PC.

Digital video, or DV, is a format that stores movies as ones and zeros on tape and hard disk. Although it takes a lot of those ones and zeroes (one minute of DV occupies about 200 megabytes on disk), digital data can be manipulated, copied endlessly, and converted to many other formats.

Once the movie is on your hard disk, you can put it through almost any imaginable manipulation. You can:

• Insert titles, controlling the color, font, size, and style as with any graphics program.
• Animate titles so they move at any speed you choose.
• Insert fades, wipes, and many other transitions, controlling the direction and time on screen.
• Correct the color, even convert an old family film to black-and-white or sepia tone. (Many DV cameras also will convert analog video into DV format.)
• Narrate a voice-over of your trip to the Grand Canyon ("That's the canyon. The big chasm on the left").
• Add stirring music to your daughter's appearance in the spelling bee.
• Dub in sound effects--say a donkey braying--as she approximates the spelling of "approximate" as "A-P-R-O-X-A-M-O-T-E."

Best of all, you can spike scenes--even individual frames--that you never want to see. Do enough editing, and friends won't throw popcorn when you mention "home video." We guarantee, good editing will make you feel like a pro.

Even though many DV camcorders fit easily in your palm, digital carries twice the detail of normal television. Basic amateur digital video cameras start at about $500. Most connect via Firewire (also known as IEEE 1194), and you'll definitely need a powerful, new computer, either Macintosh or Windows (See the sidebar: The technical requirements). You'll also need a hefty hard disk, and you'll eventually want a DVD burner.

Once you've shot the footage, you are just three steps away from a wrap: Capture to hard disk, edit (cuts, transitions, special effects, narration, and music), and export to another format.

At the export stage, you will appreciate DV's incredible flexibility:

• Export to DV tape, then plug your camera into a TV and view at full digital quality.
• Dub to VHS tape.
• Export compressed files for posting on the Web.
• Make a video CD or DVD.

For this story, we tested Pinnacle Studio 8 ($99.99), for Windows, and iMovie 2, a program Apple has given away with Macintoshes for a couple of years. (We tried to test the new Imovie 3, but it would not operate on a Mac that should, according to Apple, have run it.)

Unfortunately, the Pinnacle software was frustrating to use. After one hour loading software, it hung and crashed until our technical expert, die-hard computer programmer Johan Kellum, finally gave up. (Watch a one-minute QuickTime movie of the man-vs.-machine struggle, below.)

Apple for your eye

We had more luck on the Macintosh side, although there were too many crashes for our taste. And while we're whining, what gives with companies that sell (or even give away) software without explaining how it works? I've worked with Macs for 20 years, yet iMovie 2 was worthless until I bought iMovie 2: The Missing Manual. The Missing Manual on iMovie 3 is due out shortly (see link at bottom).

No matter what the platform, look for these features in digital video software:

• "Scene detection" divides the incoming video. Each press of "record" on the camera creates a new clip. Incredibly handy.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Editing video sounds glamorous, but the process of trimming and checking clips is monstrously repetitious without shortcuts.
• Sound manipulation. The first video software emphasized video at the expense of audio, but a movie isn't finished until--dare we say--the diva sings? Pinnacle and iMovie both allow cutaways, a pro technique that allows you to slap different video over an existing sound track.
• Render while you work. Your work will be much faster if the software can create titles and transitions in the background while you edit in the foreground.
• Goodies: How many video effects, sound effects, transitions, and titles come with the package? (Hint: You may be able to download these for free or a small charge.)
• "Preview mode" allows you to work with low-resolution files on the computer. When you've finished editing, the software grabs the correct frames from the DV tape and makes a full-resolution file.
• Multiple undos. When you edit, DV software should not really change a clip, but rather the appearance. If you accidentally delete a scene you can restore the clip.

Some final cautions

First, we found that you can waste a lot of time monkeying with the computer instead of making movies. With enough trouble, a cool hobby can be transmogrified into a horror flick.

Second, DV takes time. After making about 20 short home movies, I still need an hour to finish each minute of movie.

Third, this stuff is addictive. I still crow about a video I made of my now-14-year-old watching movies taken when he was one. I spliced between then and now like a regular Francis Ford Coppola.

Published May 26, 2003

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