Video Editing

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.

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

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?

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Originally Posted by 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?

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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

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

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...)?

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Originally Posted by Al Fernandez

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

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Al Fernandez

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!?

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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).

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. :(

yer skrewed

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Originally Posted by 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. :(

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