Tech Notes
Gah! Ripping hair out!
I tried all sorts of software to do this one. First I tried capturing with the new version of Microsoft Movie Maker, but it seems to have some bug where, if it does the capture itself, and then you try to do anything else with the resulting video, it crashes all over the place. This may not be exactly what's going on, but I'm too busy to chase down this bug for Microsoft.
So I returned to the capture function in Roxio's Easy CD/DVD Builder package (version 6), to move the raw video onto my hard disk. I then used the scene-detector feature in MGI VideoWave 5 (the version that was current when Roxio bought MGI, so I got a free copy). Its scene-detection settings are adjustable, thankfully - if you leave it at the default level of 50, you end up with a lot of 1-second scenes. After the automatic scene detector had done its job, I selected the two scenes I wanted, trimmed them a little, put them in a storyboard, and then was ready to save them out as a single movie file.
VideoWave has lots of export formats, but some of them (Windows WMV formats) caused VideoWave to crash. Others, including DV, came out with horizontal-line artifacts. Gnah.
I started learning Macromedia Flash MX (with lynda.com), and got all excited over its movie import and edit features (some of which I had already used, but without really knowing what I was doing). Sorenson's codecs are part of the package, so the output quality should be great, right?
I started Flash's video import wizard and selected to edit the video before importing it. I ended up running through the wizard about ten times, enough to have the following gripes:
- The editor isn't designed for precision: you have to drag mark-in and mark-out points around without any indication of precisely what frame you're at. I have just enough video experience for this to be irritating.
- The sequence of screens in the wizard is confusing, so it's easy to accidentally cancel out of the entire wizard - losing all the work you just did selecting your clips.
- There's no way to save a clip selection so, if you don't like the final results, you have to start the editing process all over again.
- There's no indication of how large (in MB) the resulting video will be before you've actually exported it.
- To adjust the window size of the final video, you have to go into an Advanced screen and use a slider. The slider can't be dragged precisely enough to set a standard video frame size (e.g., 320x240), nor can you just type in the numbers - you can see them, but they're grayed out.
- I tried setting a frame size of 50% of the original frame size. This came out to a non-standard size, which may be why the resulting video was full of block artifacts - yuck.
In desperation, I returned to Movie Maker. Its scene-finding feature is good and not over-sensitve, but it was still a bit temperamental when I tried to trim those two scenes and export them. But I finally got the piece saved out, at decent quality, 5.4 MB for about two minutes of video.
Then I had to import it into Flash. Somehow, the quality deteriorated a lot, no matter what settings I chose. After hours of struggling, I've decided this one will just have to stay this way for now. At least I got the Start and Stop buttons I wanted.
later
I couldn't stand it. I went back into Flash, and eventually figured out that you have to follow the lynda.com steps exactly, separating the sound and video during import and then recombining them. The steps were, in Flash MX:
- Import | Import to Stage | [filename]
- Import entire video | Next
- Edit compression profile: bandwidth 340, high quality keyframes
- Edit advanced settings: Import [as] movie clip, audio track: separate
- When processing ends, I have the movie clip, with separate video and audio files. Now I make sure that I'm looking at the movie clip layer rather than the whole Flash document (not that familiar with Flash yet, I had to hunt for it), then I add a new layer to the movie clip.
- Double-click on the sound file to open its Properties box. Set compression to MP3 and a bit-rate of 20 kbps, test that, it sounds okay.
- Drag the audio onto the stage. Now, by clicking on the first frame of the sound layer, I have access to the sound Sync property at the bottom of the Flash screen; I set that to stream so that it will be correctly timed with the video.
According to the lynda tutorial, this is so that you have more control over the sound compression, and I guess it also means that you can devote less bandwidth to the sound and therefore get better picture quality. At any rate, it looks much better for an only slightly larger file size (8.25 MB).
later still
Some people can't get the video to load on this page, so I went back and re-edited the clips to make it all shorter, the SWF (Shockwave Flash) file is now only 3.25 MB. It still needs to load completely before the video will play, perhaps because of the stop and play buttons - the previous two videos didn't have this problem. <sigh> Work in progress... |
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