Unique footage
- Made 10 years ago
- The Follow Dave?" Editing Workshop disk is old.
- The footage on the "Follow Dave?" Editing Workshop is digitized using a very old but efficient codec for clips at film speed and half resolution. Back when this CD-ROM was created, this was great. (320 by 240 pixels at 24fps compressed with the Sorenson 2 codec.)
- Not DV or HD
- Today, everyone is eager to edit movies in the DV format or even the HD format. Therefore, most basic editing programs now require either DV or HD content. Only the more advanced editing programs still work in the old multimedia formats.
- Less than ideal
- If the footage of the "Follow Dave?" disk were of the highest quality (and not just low-quality promotional material), blowing it up to DV resolution would not look too bad.
- Blowing up footage to the miniDV codec will increase the disk drive requirement drastically and the editing will be a bit awkward because now the footage is converted to 29.97 frames per second.
- But this footage is not high quality. Since the footage is very low quality, this is not a good option. Blowing up the images for "Follow Dave?" to DV resolution will look absolutely horrible.
- Therefore, it is better to use an editing program which can edit at 320 by 240 pixels at 24 pfs. That greatly limits your options.
- Letterbox also works
- Or you can letterbox the images.
- Some early editing programs automatically letteboxed footage that was imported at less than the current frame size.
- But not any more. Letterboxing clips is no longer automatic with editing programs.
- Now you must convert each clip manually into a letterboxed clip.
- 1. One way is to create a full size background and then import the clips and resize it to keep its original size.
- 2. Another way is to use Adobe AfterEffects.
- Either way, it will require a lot of disk space to letterbox these clips. But it is worth a try!
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Selecting an editing program
- Limited selecton
- You are limited to only a few editing programs which work with half size images at 24 fps.
- Adobe Premiere 4.2
- When this disk was created, there was no Final Cut Pro. There was only Adobe Premiere 4.2 which was the preferred program for editing this scene. Older computers in school still use this program. The smaller frame size saves disk space which most schools do not have. Unfortunately, Adobe Premiere 4.2 was a bit unstable with the then current operating system which was also unstable.
- Final Cut Pro
- The successor to Adobe Premiere 4.2 is Final Cut Pro even though Premiere is from Adobe and Final Cut Pro is from Apple. When Adobe Premiere 4.2 was upgraded to Final Cut Pro, the workflow of the program was changed from film editing to corporate video editing. Now, film editing in Final Cut Pro is actually more difficult than in Adobe Premiere 4.2. But Final Cut Pro 3 (or later) is such as well designed program that editing anything in Final Cut Pro is a great improvement over Adobe Premiere 4.2.
- The only problem is now Final Cut Pro does not use Sorenson 2 as a standard editing codec. Therefore, you will need to covert the footage to a new format (or do a lot of rendering.) That means you must open the clips and save them with a different codec. If you know what you are doing, this should take less than 5 minutes. In newer versions of Final Cut Pro,
- Rendering is not a bad option to avoid recompressing the clips in a different format. Once you get used to it, "render" constantly in Final Cut Pro becomes automatic. Because the clips are so small, the rendering time for each edit is very small.
- Adobe Premiere
- Adobe Premiere 5 is a totally new program. Version 5 was completely rewritten from scratch.
- Version 5 was also a disaster. Later versions became better but still, it is not recommended. Eventually, Adobe Premiere 5 and 6 were replaced by a totally new program, Adobe Premiere Pro but initially this is only for Windows computers. It will be released for the Macintosh PC computer soon.
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- I have been told that Adobe Premiere Pro can edit clips at 320 by 240 pixels at 24fps with no problem.
- Linux
- There is no editing program on Linux which can edit these clips. The problem with Linux is the lack of anything like QuickTime or Windows Media. Therefore, Linux only works with uncompressed video or perhaps DV video.
- DV editing programs
- All DV editing programs (such as iMovie or Final Cut Express) require that the clips be letterboxed. None of these programs currently will letterbox the footage automatically. Therefore, it can take an hour for you to set up an editing project to letterbox the clips. Start with a blank clip and import a clip (one of the film dailies) from "Follow Dave?" and resize it so the image is about the original size.
- Since DV is 29.97 frames per second and the clips for "Follow Dave?" are 24 fps, you might be a bit confused when you see two frames with the same frame number. You have to ignore this.
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