Video Editing

[cobra132]

Santa Claus brought me a digital video recorder. What video editing software are you guys using? FMR

[mitchntx]

Adobe Premiere Elements.

[BlueFirePony]

Adobe Premiere and After Effects
My wife does this sort of thing professionally and I think she has a few other packages that she uses but the two above are good enough for me.

[mitchntx]

There is a difference between Elements and AP/After effects ... probably $1000. I use Matrox RTX100 at work with AP w/AE,

Elements can be had for $79 ... cheaper if you already own an Adobe product, like Photoshop or Acrobat.

Pinnacle makes a decent package as well.

For use in a wider audience, use WMV format to export. That format is sorta like a lowest common denominator for playback.

[Adam Ginsberg]

Pinnacle Studio 10.

[silversvo]

This year coming up, I am planning on taking videos that you all have of the 09 season and making something like JB made. My job makes me have a lot of time on my hands, I just have to get the video editing software which I am was about to post the same question.

[cobra132]

Thanks for the info :lol:

[cjlmlml]

Pinnacle

[evarner]

Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Pinnacle Studio 12

[jeffburch]

Pinnacle Studio.
jb

[Jeremy Gunter]

Adobe/Flash suites

[mitchntx]

Saw an ad for Pinnacle V12 Ultimate was on sale at Best Buy for $79

[donovan]

Past - Adobe Premiere
Past - Pinnacle Studio
Current - Sony Vegas

[BlueFirePony]

Vegas is good - have not used the Pro 8 yet. Always been a fan of Sonic Foundry stuff.

[cobra132]

Pinnacle 12 is great. Very eazy to learn and use. Thanks. FMR

[Wirtz]

So I DLed Pinnacle 12 demo last night to do some attempts at editing. I keep having issues with the audio ending up 3 or 4 seconds in front of the video.

The native file from the camera (mov format) is fine. All I'm going is importing it to Pinnacle, then letting it think for a few minutes, then playing it in Pinnacle and the audio is off time. Same thing happens when I save the movie...

Will try searching out answers tonight, but thought I would ask here since several were using it.

Thanks,
Jeff

[jeffburch]

Why not capture in Pinnacle?
.mov may be the problem.
Capture in .avi
Dunno limitations of demo.
Full version retail is under $80 if you shop.

jb

[Wirtz]

Yeah, the MOV format has been the only down side of this cam. Too bad too, because the video from it looks great.

I can't really use the capture function. It records to an SD card but due to the size of my card and the file size, I need to move the files to a PC after each session. I guess I could try to move the files back to the cam, play them and try to capture that way.... just seems like alot of work.

I'll try exporting the file from Quicktime Pro to an AVI and see if that still has issues.

[Adam Ginsberg]

What if you bought extra SD cards, remove and mark them after each session, then put them back in the camera when using Pinnacle?

[AI#97]

During the Lemons race, I got 1hour 37 minutes on a 4 GB card which outlasted the battery. It is telling me I could get another 45 minutes onto the card... I alternate between two 4GB cards at the track....just wish I could get longer battery life but it's internal so I would need to rig up a 120V source for the full 2.5 hours or so I could get on a 4GB card. 8GB won't work sadly so those are reserved for my still cam.

Which SD cam did you get JW...?

[Wirtz]

It's the Aiptek HD one I talked about on another thread on this forum somewhere. You guys are of course right about using a larger card. Actually, I think I could fit alot more on the cards than I have been trying. But I like removing the video after each session so the car stays lighter ;)

Looks like I am going to need to go buy a mac to do any of thise stupid editing....

So far no luck in converting the mov to avi files. Either the sound is still screwed up (pulling the mov into Pinnacle) , or the aspect ratio gets mucked up (converting to avi, then importing). It looks fine through quicktime tho. grrrrrr..... this is why I do computer hardware and not software.

[AI#97]

Check my link in the General section...SD based cam for $159 and does direct upload to youtube... $159... cheaper than a mac! ;)

[Al Fernandez]

So what does a noob to video editing need to now about formats? wmv, avi, jpeg, mov...there's a pile! Whats the difference/advantages?

[mitchntx]

So what does a noob to video editing need to now about formats? wmv, avi, jpeg, mov...there's a pile! Whats the difference/advantages?

wmv-
Compressed with decent quality. File sizes are manageable. I call this the "lowest common denominator" as this format will play on most any PC.

avi-
is typically uncompressed and the image quality is fantastic. But, the price to pay is the file sizes ... they are huge.

I typically capture and edit in .avi and export to .wmv

mov-
Quicktime or Mac native. A lot of PCs struggle to play them as it requires specific codecs to playback. Can be a resource intensive process.

jpeg-
stills

[evarner]

Mitch is spot on.

Your audience will typically determine which format to use. For down and dirty (low rez/size) .wmv works great.

I'm looking for 16:9 hi rez format (.avi or .mov) files in order to introduce them into the year-end video. I can't take a 4:3 low rez and make it look good no matter what.

For those that don't have the capability, I'm always willing to take the raw media and digitize it (tape) or download digital media at the track.

Please.. please let me know. :D

[Al Fernandez]

Ok, learning as I go...I learned my computer actually has a copy of pinnacle 8 SE on it. Must've come with the machine a few years ago. Anyway, I got an avi made out of my camera's mov output. The avi file plays and sounds bitchin, so far so good. I load it into pinnacle and can play around with it, cut this section out, add a title, etc...but there's no sound!? So, if I go back to my conversion software and grab the avi and convert it to mpg2, I can open the file in Pinnacle 8 and there's sound.

So, am I losing quality by going to mpg or mpg2 instead of avi? Is there a reason why pinnacle wont grab the sound out of this avi file (other than maybe its just old software...)?

[mitchntx]

Anyway, I got an avi made out of my camera's mov output.


I think I know what you mean here ... you have captured video to your hard drive via the firewire port of your camera.

The port on your camera is a small, USB looking port, correct? That's a, IEEE1394 port ... high speed data transfer. It's the water spigot ...

... Pinnacle is the water pitcher. You can chose which color water pitcher to capture the water, though.

Pinnacle works in .AVI native, as do most decent editing programs. Windows Movie Maker uses WMV or MPEG4 and Quicktime is looking for MOVs.

If your machine seems a little sluggish, it's because it's handling data like it's never done before. And these editing programs are terrible memory managers. Consequently, I have a couple rules I live by ...

- Save early and Save Often
- Reboot the machine while you make a trip to the head

If you have a gamer machine, you should be golden. If you have an off-the-shelf HP, Dell or E-Machine, you are working it over pretty good. These machines were built to surf and do an occasional spreadsheet not shuffle this amount of data around.

One other thing, video files are huge, contiguous files. These files will fragment a harddrive in very short order. I have a utility resident that once a week, at 2am, begins a defrag and the CHKDSK on my capture drive. It helps maintain the health of the drive.




The avi file plays and sounds bitchin, so far so good. I load it into pinnacle and can play around with it, cut this section out, add a title, etc...but there's no sound!?


Is your camera still hooked up to the firewire port while trying to edit in Pinnacle? Pinnacle may be sending the audio signal to the firewire port and to the camera. Meaning, the audio is there ... it's just not being routed to the audio card inside the machine.

By default, it sends the signal back to the same source where it found it, kind of liek when you open a document, edit it and then save it ... it's saved in the same folder where it was retrieved.

Otherwise, not familiar at all with Pinnacle, in Premeire, I'd look at the import settings and make sure you have the audio set to 44K. I would also make sure the machine isn't attempting to Dolby encode staging for VOB encoding (DVD export).

[Al Fernandez]

Thanks for the advice Mitch. No firewire at all though. THe camera captures mov format onto sd card. I connected the camera via USB connection to the computer and copied the mov files to the hard drive, then disconnected the camera. Next I ran a conversion program to change the mov files to avi. The avi files play fine and sound fine, but they have no sound when I load them into pinnacle. Every other file I can find has sound when I load into pinnacle. :(

[mitchntx]

yer skrewed

[evarner]

Thanks for the advice Mitch. No firewire at all though. THe camera captures mov format onto sd card. I connected the camera via USB connection to the computer and copied the mov files to the hard drive, then disconnected the camera. Next I ran a conversion program to change the mov files to avi. The avi files play fine and sound fine, but they have no sound when I load them into pinnacle. Every other file I can find has sound when I load into pinnacle. :(

Do you have a small snippet from the .avi I can take a look and analyze?

[Todd Covini]

I'm lost.

[Wirtz]

For any the the video pros;

any tips on how to synch up video from different cameras on a car for pic in pic type stuff? On the vid I did before, I used the audio track and tried to pick a peak point at a shift as a way to get them aligned. It worked I guess, was a pain.

Any idears?

[mitchntx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapperboard

In the film industry, audio is recorded on a seperate recording device than the film. The two are mixed in post.

The reference is the clapper board. The loud pop the board makes cues up to the impact seen on film.

Anything will work. I clap my hands together once as an audio marker.

Also, don't be afraid to start the tape rolling early. So what if you record 10 minutes of Adrian doing a can-can dance. Once it's captured, it's easy to send it to the cutting room floor.

On my GoPro, I would start recording just before I got into my car and headed to grid. I would change disks between races. I had my disks sequentially numbered and always started session 1 with disk one.

That way, I knew exactly what session was on which disk.

[Wirtz]

Cool, I was thinking along those lines.... I'm planning to add a GoPro to the car this year, and was thinking the audio seems to be marginal at best, so was not sure. But I'm planning to use it for some different angles and foot cam kind of stuff. Maybe I'll just clap my feet :)

[jeffburch]

The pros use time code.
Without it it's tough sledding like you experienced.

jb

[mitchntx]

The pros use time code.
Without it it's tough sledding like you experienced.

jb

Yes, but there needs to be some sort of visual or audible cue to initially get the two sets of time code numbers matched.

These days, time code is the standard. Control Track days are long gone!

[Wirtz]

Either way, seems like getting a forward and rearward facing camera synched will be a bit of a trick... So using a audio signal seems to be the more practical. No matter, it will probably be a case of just needing to futz with it to get it "good enough".

Thanks guys,
Jeff

[Rob Liebbe]

At work we use an audio sync (air horn over the radio due to large areas covered by cameras) to put a stamp on about 8 different cameras. Some use a coach's whistle over the radio.