Video production and editing

My son has expressed a recent interest in video production and editing. He isn't sure where to start because the equipment seems so confusing to him. We had a camcorder that took small video tapes many years ago but it completely packed up. It was used to film family events but we didn't get as far as editing the videos. Is there somebody here with knowledge of video technology who is able to offer him advice?

Video production and editing is a massive subject. Countless books have been written about all aspects of the subject and the internet is awash with tons of information. I'm assuming you want to use readily available modern consumer equipment rather than traditional or professional equipment, so I won't cover these in this article.

There are three essential things you need to produce videos.

1. A camcorder.

2. Video editing software.

3. A DVD writer or a website to upload videos to.

Camcorders

Camcorders are a minefield and it is important to spend time learning about them and finding out what is on the market before making a purchase. Consumer and semi-professional camcorders are divided into two main categories - analogue and digital - and further subdivided according to the type of media they record onto.

Analogue camcorders record onto video tapes with the main consumer formats being VHS-C, Betamax, Video8, and Hi8. They are cheap to buy secondhand but most are bulky and the quality of video recording isn't very high. Video outputs are either composite video, RGB video, or S-Video, all of which are analogue, and cannot be directly connected to a computer without a video interface card or adaptor. Analogue camcorders are generally considered to be obsolete and are not very convenient for regular use with computer editing.

Digital camcorders are subdivided into those that record onto tapes and those that record onto some other media. The first generation digital camcorders introduced in 1995 used tapes. They are still common but are gradually being replaced by the second generation tapeless camcorders that appeared a few years ago and record onto Mini DVDs, hard drives, or flash memory cards.

MiniDV and Digital8 are the two main consumer digital tape formats. Digital8 camcorders are uncommon and the format appears to be obsolete. MiniDV is a popular and well supported format and camcorders are available from several manufacturers. Tape based camcorders are a technology on the way out but there is considerable support for MiniDV by serious users because the quality of the video is high. Used MiniDV camcorders are very affordable and ideal for first time and occasional users.

DVD camcorders record video and audio directly onto a Mini DVD which can be played back either on a standard DVD player or computer. They are popular with casual users but not the best choice for people who regularly edit videos on a computer.

Hard drive camcorders record video and audio onto an inbuilt hard drive. They have an advantage of long recording times (40 hours being common) but the hard drives are rarely removeable and can be damaged by shock or impact. Hard drive camcorders are the preferred choice by most regular and serious users, but are expensive.

Flash memory camcorders record video and audio onto flash memory cards. Recording time is much shorter than with hard drive camcorders, but flash memory cards are more robust than hard drives and the media is removeable. Flash memory camcorders cost less than hard drive camcorders but the memory cards are quite expensive items. Some flash memory camcorders deploy heavy compression to fit as much video footage as possible onto a memory card which significantly degrades the quality of the video. Mobile phones with a video recording facility are a variety of flash memory camcorders although the quality of video they produce is lower than that of most standalone camcorders. Several DVD and hard drive camcorders also have the facility to record video data onto flash memory cards.

Transferring video data to a computer

Every MiniDV camcorder has an IEEE 1394 port (sometimes referred to as FireWire, DVlink, or i.Link) to transfer video data to a computer. Most recent laptops have an IEEE 1394 port as standard and IEEE 1394 expansion cards for desktop computers are cheap and readily available. The video data is transferred to the computer in real time which means one hour of footage takes one hour to transfer to the computer. A software utility is required to transfer video data and the camcorder manufacturer usually supplies a version which runs under Windows. The utility for computers running Linux is called dvgrab. Some video editing software packages also have facilities to transfer video data via IEEE 1394. Video data is normally saved in either DV of AVI file formats but some utilities can also save it in other video file formats. More recent MiniDV camcorders have a USB port but this isn't generally suitable for transferring video data with.

Video data recorded on a Mini DVD cannot be directly copied to a computer hard drive using the file manager and neither can it be accessed by many video editing software packages. The only way to transfer video data from a Mini DVD to a computer is with a software package called a DVD ripper which reads the video data from the Mini DVD then saves it on the computer hard drive in MPEG-2 format.

Hard drive camcorders have a USB port and some high end models also have an IEEE 1394 port. The usual way to transfer video data to a computer is via the USB port. Software utilities are not usually required because when the camcorder is connected to the computer it appears as a USB drive and each video recording as a file. Video data can then be transferred to the computer using the file manager or accessed by viewing and editing software packages. The majority of hard drive camcorders record video data as MPEG-2 files which is an industry standard format, but a few Sony camcorders use the M2TS file format. Software utilities are available for Windows and Linux to convert M2TS files to MPEG-2 and other video file formats. Video data is compressed resulting in it transferring faster than in real time. One hour of footage typically transfers in around 15 minutes.

Video data can be transferred from flash memory camcorders either via the USB port in the same way as for hard drive camcorders, or by removing the flash memory card from the camcorder and inserting it into a computer. The flash memory card appears as a USB drive and each video recording as a file. Video data can then be transferred to the computer using the file manager or accessed by viewing and editing software packages. High end flash memory camcorders record video data as MPEG-2 files, but low end camcorders record video data as MPEG-4 or AVI files. Many mobile phones also record video data in MPEG-4 format, often as 3GP files. Most recent laptops have a memory card slot of a particular type depending on the manufacturer. If you plan on using a camcorder with memory cards then it will make things easier if you select one that uses the same type of memory cards that your laptop uses.

Video editing software

There are many video editing software packages and Wikipedia has a comprehensive list and comparison of them. Avid, Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe Premiere, and Final Cut Pro are the most popular commercial packages. I use Cinelerra which is free and runs under Linux but it won't run under Windows. Cinelerra is feature rich and suitable for professional use, although its user interface is somewhat clunky and unintuitive.

Video editing is computationally intensive. A fast CPU, lots of memory, and plenty of space on your hard drive are required. A high end graphics card is also an advantage.

Producing a DVD

To create DVDs you need a DVD writer and blank recordable DVDs that are compatible with your DVD writer. The DVD specification requires that video data is encoded using MPEG-2 and audio data is encoded using AC-3 at a sample rate of 48 kHz. The correct encoding parameters to produce a PAL DVD are a picture size of 720 x 576 pixels with a rate of 25 frames per second. Modern practice is to create videos in widescreen format with an aspect ratio of 16:9 rather than the older aspect ratio of 4:3. The MPEG-2 video file is then converted to a DVD image and written to the DVD using a DVD burning software package.

Many, many thanks for all this information. It has been of tremendous help for my son and cleared up much of the confusion surrounding the subject.

I dragged the old camcorder out of the closet. It's VHS-C so isn't very useful in the digital era. We were advised not to buy a DVD camcorder for precisely the reasons you have given. My son thinks a flash memory card camcorder would be the best for him but he might be able to get his hands on a MiniDV camcorder quite cheaply. In the meantime he will use the video camera on his mobile phone to capture some footage to experiment with.

We've never heard of Cinelerra before. Everybody we've discussed video editing with has mentioned software packages for Windows and the Apple Macintosh that are quite expensive. My son has recently started playing with Linux and installed it on an old Pentium 3 but thinks the computer is too old and slow for video editing. A new laptop with both Linux and Cinelerra installed will perfectly combine two of his interests.

A local AS support group carries out video work every now and again and has also recorded some plays performed by the younger children and teenagers. I shall ask them if they have any advice on video production and editing. My son is a Linux enthusiast and has installed Cinelerra. He says it's useful for cutting apart and modifying video clips downloaded from the internet.

My son would like to know if anybody here has any experience using professional video equipment. Over the last year he has been working with consumer grade equipment but is now interested in learning more about the equipment actually used by programme producers and TV companies.

There's plenty of material about professional video equipment on the internet. Most manufacturers have websites containing detailed information about products they sell. If your son wants to get his hands on professional equipment then he will have to find somebody who works in film and programme production. Last time I visited the (now demolished) TVS studio in Southampton almost all the professional video equipment was analogue. Most modern professional video equipment is digital. Some college and university film and media departments might have some professional video equipment so are worth investigating.

Somebody here might be able to offer some tips of advice on an issue troubling my son. He has experience of working with video clips on a computer and uses the VLC media player to view them and FFmpeg to convert videos from one file format to another. His latest project is a website incorporating videos that he proposes to eventually turn into his own internet TV station. He is confused over which video file format to use even after spending much time studying the pros and cons of each format. Most websites incorporating videos currently use Flash but my son wants to build his website using HTML5 and the <video> tag because his experience of Flash is that it is difficult to use and unreliable. So far he has managed to build a reliable working website using the <video> tag and video clips in the Theora file format. He doesn't think that Theora will become a popular choice for HTML5 video because the quality isn't as good as that from H.264 and his findings are that industry appears to be backing H.264 as the standard file format. The web browser he uses is Firefox but it does not work with H.264 and there are no plans to make it work with H.264 in the future because it is a patented file format with too many legal issues attached to it whereas Theora is open source. More recently he has encountered the Dirac file format and WebM that uses the VP8 file format - both of which are open source. Unfortunately no web browser appears to support them at the moment. Can anybody offer any thoughts on the matter?

I asked my son about video file formats for the internet and he told me that IE7 and IE8 don't support the <video> tag which means that Flash is here to stay for mass market video websites until an HTML5 compatible version of IE is released. Even after an HTML compatible version of IE is released, millions of users will continue to use older versions of IE for a few more years so Flash probably won't disappear until at least 2015. IE6 is 9 years old this year but still refuses to die.

After a long hard think about the matter several months ago he concluded that the organisation with the greatest leverage in imposing society's accepted standard video file format for HTML5 is YouTube. The cynic in him says that Micro$oft also knows this and has deliberately avoided incorporating the <video> tag into IE until YouTube decides which file format to use. He thinks that prototype versions of IE with the <video> tag and codecs for all major video file formats already exist within Micro$oft, so as soon as YouTube announces its choice of file format, the next version of IE will be revealed to the world in a matter of minutes.

My son says that H.264 is well supported by the computer and electronics industry but Theora is not taken seriously by many people outside of the open source community. H.264 codec chips are commercially available for computer graphics cards and mobile phones in order to take the strain off the CPU. No commercially manufactured Theora codec chips are known to exist meaning that Theora decoding can only be implemented in software running on the main CPU.

The Dirac codec fascinates my son because it uses wavelet compression rather that the discrete cosine transform which is at the heart of most other video codecs including H.264, VP8, and Theora. He thinks that wavelet compression could be the pathway to creating high quality high efficiency video codecs in the future.

It's likely that Flash and HTML5 video will coexist side by side for a few years because of many people continuing to use obsolete versions of IE, and the time and effort required to convert existing websites from using Flash to HTML5. I have found a very good website for HTML code snippets that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> tag and automatically invokes Flash if the web browser does not support the <video> tag.

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

Here are some very informative websites about using the HTML5 <video> tag complete with several useful HTML code snippets.


http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/intr ... ml5-video/

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/oper ... ebm-video/

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/ever ... and-audio/



Following an open letter submitted by the Free Software Foundation to Google (the owners of YouTube) after they purchased the On2 video compression technology company (which developed the VP8 video codec), the WebM video file format was revealed on the 19th May and will be used to supply videos on YouTube along with the H.264 video file format.

The WebM video file format consists of the VP8 video codec and the Vorbis audio codec in a modified version of the Matroska container format, and is released under the BSD licence as an open source product. Video quality from VP8 is much higher than Theora and almost as good as that from H.264. Have a look at the WebM website for more information.

http://www.webmproject.org



Information from the developers at Micro$oft states that IE9 will support the HTML5 <video> tag using an inbuilt codec for playing back H.264 video files and will allow playback of WebM video files providing a separate VP8 codec plugin is installed. The reason for using a separate VP8 codec plugin has something to do with avoiding lawsuits if VP8 is found to violate a software patent in the future.

Only Firefox 4 Beta and Opera 10.6 are capable of playing back WebM video files using the HTML5 <video> tag at the moment.

It's unlikely that Safari will support WebM as Apple is 100% committed to H.264. Steve Jobs isn't very happy about the development of WebM as a competitor to H.264...



Theora will remain supported by some web browsers for the foreseeable future but it is now out of the race to become the standard HTML5 video file format. The contest now is between WebM and H.264.



More information about Dirac:

http://diracvideo.org

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac

http://dirac.sourceforge.net/overview.html

Many thanks from my son for all this tremendously useful advice. He has decided to use WebM for his videos now that web browsers are available that support it. Today he downloaded Firefox 4 Beta and is planning on building a website at the weekend to host WebM video clips. The websites with the HTML code snippets appear to be a wealth of information although he hasn't had time to study them thoroughly. I'll provide updates on his progress.