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I'm now on my second high-def movie editing project.
I am starting to understand how it works a bit better. The slowness during importing is not because my laptop can't receive the data in real-time from the camera. That's no problem at all, as if you watch the LCD on the camera you see the footage replaying smoothly. Instead it seems to be the transcoding from HDV format (http://www.hdv-info.org/) to Apple Intermediate Codec format, since even after the tape stops, the laptop spends several more hours churning away doing something.
The first time I realised this is how it works I not only pressed stop on the camera as soon as the footage finished, and then disconnected the firewire cable so I could put the camera away (it's not something I like to leave out where it could attract Lucy's attention). Unfortunately, soon after this the laptop noticed the disconnect and killed the import operation retaining only the footage it had finished converting. This seems like a bug to me!
Not wanting to splice together two sections of footage from the continuous source, I deleted my project and reimported. The second attempt wasn't anywhere near done by 11.30pm so I left it running overnight.
The next morning, I came down to find the laptop hard drive near full, with the films clips totalling about 35 minutes - not the full 40 minutes. iMovie HD seems to graciously refuse to take the hard disk to 100% full, instead leaving a few hundred megs out of my original 25GB or so free space.
Editing a large file like this which used up nearly the last few megs of the drive is where even iMovie starts to breakdown. It turns out that the raw filesystem performance for that file can get down as low as 1-2MB/s as observed in the Apple "Activity Monitor" application. This causes iMovie to give up trying to replay the video, so editing becomes near impossible. I was forced to move the files to my external firewire hard drive, which isn't that fast, but is massively faster when it has 50GB free on it than my laptop drive with 500MB!
I eventually struggled through this project on my laptop, but it's clear I'm going to need some serious hardware!
posted at: 22:20 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
Sony HDR-FX1 - report on my first project
I shot a rock gig to start with to get a feel for this camera. At nearly five pounds, I don't expect to be able to hand-hold it for very long without the $300 brace (which I don't have) so instead I bought a general purpose tripod and took a rather static approach. I'm viewing this project as something of a test, however it turned out quite well and provided a lot of useful answers to questions I'd been wondering about.
I used a regular Mini-DV tape, not the special 63 minute Sony HDV tapes (which appear to be just high-spec Mini-DV tapes anyway). I didn't suffer any dropouts, but if I start to I might invest in the high-grade tapes for "events" like this. Regular tapes, plus regular cleaning, make more sense for experimenting. After all if I get a bit of a dropout filming something I can film again later, it's less of a big deal.
Taking a $3400 camera to a punk rock gig in Manhattan made me a little nervous - I don't even have a case for it yet - so I put it in a plastic shopping bag and just took VERY good care of it!
On the other hand, something so big is a little unusual in such circumstances, especially on a tripod. When people came and stood right in my shot I just tapped them on the shoulder and pointed to the camera. They mostly moved like they'd been stung. I had no right, of course, but if they hadn't even seen the camera and didn't mind moving, well then it worked out. The one person who wasn't so impressed turned out to be half of the headline act - Gil Mantera's Party Dream - whoops, sorry! I'll have to make it up to them...
One thing I have struggled with on these types of shoots is the volume level. Basically these gigs are too loud to record on the built-in mic of my other camera, the DCR-TRV70, so I've had to use a decent quality plug-in powered microphone.
My first question was how is the manual sound level control on the FX-1. So far my answer is "mixed". I used the manual dial and the onscreen levels to adjust the sensitivity, but firstly it's not clear how high the peaks should be - all the way across? Half-way? Maybe this is in the manual, but I haven'd found it. I took a guess and set them to peak at about 75%, but from the soundtrack I ended up with, I would say perhaps this was too high. Next time I will probably try again with my external mic, but anyway my results were :
But I know this not the interesting bit. Audio recording isn't going through quite such an unheaval as the transition from SD to HD and 4:3 to 16:9. The big question is : what's the picture like?
It'd be nice to just post samples, but I haven't shared my results with the band yet, and since they haven't approved any video for release anyway, I'm not about to (but I'm working on it).
The answer though, is this : The picture quality of the Sony HDR-FX1 is absolutely freaking amazing. When I plugged the camera into our Sony TV and played it back for my wife and some guests, everyone was astonished. Colors, detail, lack of low-light artifacts. It has to be seen to be believed. It's kind of unbelievable. I'm glad I did the right thing, I bought one to find out for myself, because trying to be 100% certain it's a good buy by reading the web is a bit like learning about beer from chemistry textbooks. I made a "normal" DVD and I am thrilled with the results (not the audio, my camera-work or editing, but just the sheer image quality). For a rock gig in a tiny venue on the Lower East Side (small, cramped, poorly lit), it's beyond good value for money.
And now some "tech notes" for the truly interested.
These figures point to some of the downsides of the "HD Revolution". My laptop struggled to import the footage, running at 1/4 - 1/8 real-time speed. I'm sure that can't be good for the tape drive in the camera.
When I opened up iMovie with the resulting monster 19GB file, it complained that I need 1GHz cpu for HD (my powerbook is 867MHz). Doing very basic editing of the footage into chapters for each song worked perfectly well, but then when I output to iDVD, the rendering literally took all night. I had to put my laptop on a wireframe cookie cooler that I have, as I was afraid it would break (again) from getting so hot.
Some stuff is a bit more sensible though. For example, it is not actually necessary to own a high-def TV to start working with high-def footage - we don't for instance. When I connected my camera up, I just used the composite video cable, and it "just worked". Clearly it just puts out a non-high-def, but still widescreen signal, and the TV had no problem (Sony WEGA 32-inch).
I'm sure there are people who have put off "going high-def" until they can get an "end-to-end" solution, but in my view there is no need. My workflow is all regular definition for playback, but the extra definition is not impossibly intrusive and I am able to start accumulating raw footage in HD. As time goes by, I'll get the HDTV for living room playback, the "high-def Mac" for editing, and the HDDVD or Blu-Ray burner for making high-def DVDs, but by then my daughter will be a few years older and the bands I'm filming could be famous (or retired and flipping burgers) - I wont be able to go back in time and re-capture high-def versions of past events, and in the meantime, I'm getting better results in regular definition anyway.
High-Def : The Time is Now!
More links : CamcorderInfo.com
posted at: 00:03 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
I bought myself a new video camera. It's a Sony HDR-FX1. I've got a lot to learn before I can really try it out. In the meanwhile, here are some of the writeups on it that persuaded me this is the one for me
For now, though, I think the overwhelming impression is "that's a lot of
buttons!".
posted at: 21:16 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
My Daughter pulled a fast one on me earlier in the week. I was looking after her by myself while my wife had to work late. So we played a bit, read some books, watched a little TV, had a bite to eat etc. All pretty unremarkable.
At one point, however, she was about three feet from me behind the arm of the sofa. I was browsing the web and she was very quiet, so I figured she was fine - all her books are on a little shelf there. I'd know if she moved anywhere. Anyway after about five minutes I got up to check how she was doing, only to find a picture of absolute devastation. Well, the tissue box was fairly gone anyway.
There seemed to be only two possible reactions - tell her No! collect all the tissues, get the box away from her, or ... get the camera.
Plan B is clearly better, so I now proudly presentThe Tissue
Episode. I took a bunch of stills, then exported them to quicktime
directly from iPhoto. It made a nice little souvenir
posted at: 10:00 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
iDVD5 audio sync problems - solved
As usual, a spot of googling works wonder for software issues. Dan Slagel's iMovie FAQ explains how to extract the audio from the video clips in iMovie. Doing this solved the audio sync issues for me. I wish I knew why.
Reimporting my footage from scratch in iMovie HD and re-editing the DVD solved the bad menus issue, so I finally made a DVD. Actually I made about seven copies, which takes about half the day. Roll on 8X and faster drives (maybe my next laptop, or perhaps I will eventually make good on my promise to get a Powermac G5 one day).
The burn to disc image option is useful for checking a DVD. After making two useless coasters, I started to use this feature. You end up with a .IMG file on the desktop, which the OS X DVD player happily plays. You can also burn this file to DVD, but doing so makes a DVD with one file on it - the .IMG file. It doesn't make a playable disc. I presume this is because of the royalty issue
In my opinion, Apple needs to end this policy. You cannot get iDVD free any more. Either you buy a new Mac and get the software pre-installed, or you buy iLife. Either way, Apple could extract the DVD royalty payment for the right to burn DVDs in such a way that they didn't have to lock iDVD to Superdrive.
Otherwise though, my faith in Apple is somewhat restored :)
posted at: 20:39 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
Ignoring the missing audio for the first 1 1/2 tracks, I've been working on a DVD of the gig.
I mail-ordered iLife '05 a few days ago, and transferred the footage to iMovie, and edited it into shape roughly. I'm still hoping to see a CD from the Lime Spider to provide better audio, but so far it hasn't arrived.
The iLife box arrived last night, so I figured I'd install it first, then do a DVD and make use of all the great new features. Boy was I wrong.
Firstly I was excited to hear about the new archiving option so you can save the complete project. Unfortunately it didn't work, it wouldn't fit on a DVD. Pretty disappointing, seeing as I only have 1/2 hour of footage and am using standard Apple templates. I can't use an external dual-layer burner because of the stupid iDVD burning restriction
So I exported my film from iMovie to iDVD, knocked it into shape using the "Full Frame 1" template and kicked off a burn.
Unfortunately, the resulting DVD wouldn't play on my Sony DVD player, nor on my laptop, the menus would crash the player, the video would eventually get stuck, and the audio was not in sync.
It seems iDVD 5 has some NASTY BUGS. Boo!
So far I have tried a different template from the 5.0 list - still no good, tried an older, simpler template, and tried exporting to an image file (.IMG) instead of wasting another blank DVD. Still rubbish... the video and audio do not sync up.
I sent some "feedback" aka bug report to Apple complaining about this, and in the meanwhile, I think I will have to try reimporting the raw footage into the updated iMovie (iMovie HD). My assumption is that the bug is some glitch when importing a project from an older version of iMovie and then exporting it to iDVD5.
If that doesn't work I'll be stuck, unable to make any more DVDs.
posted at: 12:08 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
My last project was an "MTV video" for Made Out Of Babies (see my moob blog). I used iMovie and it was like torture. I was trying to sync studio sound to live footage and iMovie is inadequate.
No problem though, firstly iMovie is great at the price. Secondly, Apple ofers an affordable next rung on the ladder in the form of Final Cut Express which is $300. Not cheap, but once you have run into the limits of iMovie, and spent an even and formed a headache from its poor suport of fine adjustments, it seems to make sense.
So I bought FCE and had a go. The next project is a couple more gig DVDs (which only involves trimming footage which has both audio and video), and after a few evenings and some readings of the manual, I've come to the conclusion I'd rather go back to iMovie.
FCE doesn't control my camera (Sony DCR-TRV70), it doesn't have
any obvious iDVD integration, it seems to get horribly slow once you
apply any filters (filters being one of the selling points) and it's
a huge and complex program. I don't actually think I made a mistake,
but it's going to take a while to learn, and I will probably need
a serious computer to
use it properly. For example, my latest footage (from
http://www.thelimespider.com/) needs to be gamma corrected. So I
install a filter and try some editing. Now my cursor is flickering
the entire time. Everything is slow. The preview window refuses to
show anything, and instead says "unrendered". iMovie is clearly
better for a film-making pleb like me.
posted at: 23:07 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry