Consumer Video Tips

You spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on a camera or camcorder that records video, a computer, software and accessories. And then you spend your precious time to learn about shooting video. And then you spend your precious time and money to go out and actually capture some video. And then you spend precious time editing the video…

What happens to all those video files? You have the raw assets, canned assets, the edits, the music, the stills you insert and the finished product. What do you do with all those files?

Video cameras look at hard drives the way I look at a box of hot, buttered popcorn. . . that is – something to be consumed quickly! So if you shoot, edit and produce a great deal of video, you’ll soon learn that you need a great deal of hard disk space.

But wait – there’s more!

You’ll also soon need a great deal of BACKUP hard disk space. That’s right – you need to back up all that hard work. You don’t want to risk losing that data in the event that your main hard drive fails. And fail they all eventually do.

So the answer is to but AT LEAST as much backup hard drive space as you have primary space.

One way to do that affordably and effectively is using drive arrays like Drobo from Data Robotics. I’ll post a separate review of the Drobo later, but it’s essentially a box with a computer in it that holds SATA drives. You connect the box to your computer, copy files to it and you have a safe, redundant backup.

Whatever tools or system you use, please carefully consider backing up EVERYTHING. As a good friend of mine says, unless you have a backup, you don’t have anything.

Every week or so, we’re going to pick at least one question from our audience to answer on the blog. Hopefully, these answers will help everyone. If you have a question, send it to bournemediagroup at gmail.com.

Here’s today’s question from Robert Sorbo…

When importing a movie from Final Cut Express 4.0 into iDVD that was shot 16:9, iDVD stretches it even further on output.

I shot the footage on a Panasonic DV953 camera with its 16:9 mode. FCE recognizes it correctly, but iDVD does not.

I Googled it and found others that have had this problem and had success by changing the movie’ size in the Quicktime conversion.

That didn’t work for me. I did get the movie to burn correctly in Toast, but then it doesn’t keep my chapter markers.

Just wondering if you’ve heard of this and know a solution.
—
It’s always hard to know the precise answer to something as complex as this Robert but in consultation with my buddy Alex Lindsay at the Pixelcorps, I believe this could be a problem related to iDVD misinterpreting the non-square pixels for square pixels and stretching them.

Our good friend QuickTime Pro http://www.apple.com/quicktime/pro/
can help here. Just use QTP to convert to “pro-res” before sending the file to iDVD and all should be well.

This is probably a good time to point out that Apple’s QuickTime Pro (which is cross-platform) is a swiss army knife that should be in everybody’s video toolbox. It’s great for solving problems like this one.

“We’ll fix it in post!”

NO! YOU WON’T!

One of the biggest mistakes made by video shooters is the false belief that they can fix mistakes in post.

If you didn’t get the sound as you recorded the shot – if you were out of focus – if you’re hand-holding technique resulted in poor footage, etc., etc., etc., you will probably be sorry if you think you can fix it after you shoot it.

Even long-standing professionals know that it’s hard to sync dialog, or cut around bad footage. Amateurs have even less chance for success.

It’s always best to get it right in the camera. Besides making it actually possible to get the result you want, getting it right in the camera is less time-consuming, less expensive and less stressful, than trying to fix it later.

Don’t be lazy. Stay on the shot until you get it right. You’ll be happier in the end. And you’ll actually have a realistic chance of getting the results you want. Hoping to fix it in post will most likely mean failure.

The Nikon D90 is a DSLR that also shoots video. This review deals strictly with the D90 as a video camera.

The movie mode is an incredible idea. This is the first DSLR that also shoots real 720p HD video. (There’s even an on-board HDMI port – a rarity in this price range.) The process of recording video isn’t very intuitive. It’s obvious that this camera was designed for still photography NOT video. The ergonomics are not terrible for shooting video, but could be better. And the results? If you’re patient, good at manual focus (the D90 autofocus is switched off in movie mode) and you shoot from a tripod, you can make good video with this device. But it will take some practice. After numerous tries, I haven’t been able to focus the camera for video so I gave up on it. 

While I appreciate the bonus of the movie mode, it’s important to note that I wouldn’t buy this camera just because of that. You can get a much better quality dedicated digital camcorder for $1000. The lack of an audio input other than the built-in mic, and no control whatsoever over aperture and shutter speed eliminate many cool tricks that could be done with this camera.

That said, I can see a whole bunch of cool videos being made with it anyway…much the way people take advantage of a Holga camera’s flaws to make a creative statement, people will be able to do the same thing with video on the D90. I just won’t be one of those people.

I do believe this camera is ground-breaking in that it shows a huge interest in the convergence between still and video. And I expect the next Nikon DSLR will have an even more advanced, refined and valuable approach to shooting video. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion.

NOTE: I had trouble working with the movie files (they appear to be AVI’s) in Final Cut Pro. So I imported them into Streamclip, a free utility that converts them into .mov files that worked well in both Final Cut Pro and iMovie. You should also note that Nikon doesn’t supply any movie conversion or editing software with the D90.