This must be your shift, Brian. Welcome!
Mac. iMove. iDVD. It literally couldn't be easier, There are no menus
other than the one saying "Play." Except for changing tapes, the
capture ran unattended and it didn't involve the trouble of breaking
the footage into bite-sized chunks either before or after capture and
the quality is great. After capture, my total time spent in iMovie and
iDVD amounted to less than 1/2 hour. My computer is a few years old
so, yes, it took a lot of time for iDVD to write a VIDEO_TS folder
from which I could then make copies. Indeed this happened while i was
asleep. FYI I do a lot of similar "real" work while i'm sleeping so,
yes, this *was* time taken from my actual work. I have a 2 month-old
32X Sony dual-layer DVD recorder in this computer and I have yet to
produce a coaster. Verbatin discs rule. (Here's a good resource that
rates the quality of blank DVDs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm)
Several people asked me for DVDs as "hard" copies including the lawyer
retained by the associations with whom I'm involved on this project
and I told John Fenton at the meeting that he could have one, so they
were my first priority and would have the highest quality. I'd think
they'd probably be much easier to use in court as well.
Actually, I think DVDs are more useful in some ways simply because all
of the footage is in one handy container and viewers can pop it into
their computers or dvd players, FF and RW to their heart's content at
64X without having to find the exact one of the 15 10 minute segments
containing the part they are looking for and no one has to worry about
the vagaries of an internet connection. They are easily copyable, too.
If someone is willing to make notes identifying the participants in
the meeting, I'll be glad to publish a guide or even re-rip the
footage with chapters.
By the way, no one from the Spruce HIll Community Association or their
Zoning Committee has contacted me about obtaining a disc, nor has a
single one of them said "Thank you." Sadly, some of them only seem
interested in criticizing their neighbors' efforts to distribute a
verbatim record of a public meeting. It would be just as easy for SCHA
to tape these meetings and put them online or in an archive themselves.
Having owned a successful subscription-based video website in the
past, I'm pretty familiar with posting video footage online. There's
no need to school me on it. Nonetheless, John Ellingsworth was nice
enough to enquire if he could do that for me and I gladly handed the
footage over to him. I honestly don't have the time to once again
reformat the footage then upload it. I believe I previously stated
why my wake and sleep-time CPU cycles are already in use. I believe
John will be posting it on his own web space and I'm sure he'll let us
know as soon as it's available. Maybe he'll be more receptive to your
video tutorial.
Frank
On Feb 18, 2008, at 06:49 PM, Brian Siano wrote:
Frank wrote:
It's fairly simple but you probably know you can't just upload a
DVD, nor 28GB of raw DV footage that easily. I use my computer for
work: video editing and processing, image manipulation, etc. and
I'm familiar with the process. Capturing the 2.5 hours of footage
and getting it to fit on a single-layer DVD took 10 hours of
computer time. I can't afford to use this computer to reformat the
video again because I have work to do.
I have to admit, I'm a little surprised at this. You see, if you
want to get video out to people quickly, efficiently, and with far
less technical jiggery-pokery, you put it on YouTube or Google
Video. Image quality isn't a major issue with this. Imaging a DVD
for something like this is, well, kind of labor-intensive.
As you know, when you image a DVD, you have to perform a LOT of
work. It may require converting the video to another format,
deciding on a DVD format, generating menus... and it couldn't have
been easy to squish a 2.5-hour video onto a standard DVD. Let alone
the inevitable series of failed burns. And the net result is
something that requires a long DVD-burning process to copy, and
distribution is hand-to-hand, almost. Not exactly the best way when
you want to share the meeting with an interested community.
But putting a video onto the Web is much, much easier and far more
efficient. You recompile the video as a Quicktime file. You don't
even have to reduce the resolution: Google or Youtube does that
after you upload it. You could also recompile them in ten minute
chunks. As for the computer time, you just run the recompile at the
end of the day, and it's done by next morning: it wouldn't impact on
your job at all. Once you have the files, you upload them onto
Google or Youtube (again, an overnight upload would avoid work
conflicts), publish the links to the listserv, and now _thousands_
of people can watch them without requiring you to burn a copy of a
DVD.
I did this with the FoCP's meetings. Hunt around on our website, http://www.clarkpark.info
, and you'll see them.
I've handed it off to someone else who will have it online shortly.
Guess that's the best strategy we can have right now.
I've distributed a few DVDs (to my immediate neighbors who asked me
to shoot the meeting and promised to make copies for those who want
them and to John Fenton who asked for a copy) but my time with them
is over.
Good thing you handed it off to someone else, then. Hope to see it
online soon!
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