Took me six months to get this edited but finally, it is here – the Civil War Battle Re-enactment performed by members of the Washington Civil War Association at Riverside State Park, Spokane, Wa, on Memorial Day weekend 2010.
Finding Music for Your Online Videos
4 Ways to Find Legal Music for Your YouTube Videos.
I have both a library of licensed ‘royalty free music’, plus I have also used music from incompetech.com for which I sent a donation via Paypal.
Shooting video with a still camera
Last summer, we were on a family camping trip in the Canadian Rockies.
I saw hardly anyone using a video camera and I was bewildered at no one using video cameras anymore?
I guess I can be a little dense – it hit me that everyone is now taking their videos with smart phones and still cameras. Hello? Duh!
I got religion and bought a factory refurbished Canon SX1 at a very deep discount. The good news is – the camera exceeds my expectations and cost a huge amount less than the fancy DSLRs. Its not the DSLR’s price that will kill you – its that you’ll soon need a $600 lens, and then a $1200 lens … and pretty soon you are broke.
The SX1 does everything those cameras do except – no interchangeable lens (which can be a good thing), no where near the narrow depth of field of DSLR, better low light performance and … well, unless you shoot professionally and need huge blow ups and narrow depth of field, the SX1 is just fine.
The bad news is that I’ve been much too busy to make much use of the SX1 yet 🙁
In good light, the camera’s 1920×1080/30p video is outstanding. I took the camera down to a nearby river and shot video of some geese and ducks and the images were stunning.
But in low light, not so good! Too noisy for me. Regardless, I bought this camera to replace carrying both a video camera and a still camera when I am out hiking or doing other activities. Its perfect for activities like these.
It won’t replace my video camera though. For controlling exposure, using external mics, recording long events, or shooting 24p – the video cameras still rule.
Link to sample video – available in 1920x1080p at the link. The compression artifacts you see are from YouTube, not from the original video.
… Oh, the SX1 is primarily a still image camera and takes very good still images. The main problem with any of these CMOS cameras is the noise (graininess) of the stills goes up rapidly and can be annoying at ISO 400 and up. This is true of all small imager cameras. Those images can be cleaned up remarkably well with noise removal software like NeatImage. ISO 400 and 800 images can end up looking near perfect after processing with NeatImage.
Do you need 1920x1080p? While I notice the difference between 1920×1080 and 1280×720, most people do not. Many people do not even have a way to watch their own videos in full 1920x1080p.
Therefore, you can save a lot by buying a Canon SX20 or SX30, which shoot 1280×720/30p. Both run about 25 Mbps compressed video data rates, which is more bits per pixel than the 1920×1080 – but with fewer overall bits for disk storage and time spent editing on your computer. There are many camera choices available for taking 1280x720p video – and you may be just as pleased with those results as with 1920×1080/30p.
MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software
MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software.
I sprung for the “Plus” version of Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, from German software company, Magix. Runs on Windows.
I’ve only used it for a bit to do some “toy editing” of a mixed group of AVCHD files of different sizes and from different sources. Trying to make things hard for the program! Everything worked fine and was able to edit the AVCHD files natively on my $400 quad core Windows 7 box. I output to both 1280×720 and 1920×1080 MP4 files to watch on the computer and on a computer connected to the HDTV – excellent results.
The program has a unique user interface in that it can be operated in “movie clip” mode, like iMovie, or timeline mode, like Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere. I found this interface very slick – I could string together whole clips quickly in “clip” view then switch to the time line and do more precise edits, create cross dissolves, etc. Creating dissolves is very easy and, by default, is set to automatic: just drag the edge of one clip over the edge of another and Movie Edit Pro automatically sets up a dissovle.
I’ve used only a few features such as image stabilization (worked VERY well for my test clips – better than the similar feature in Vegas).
I have not yet done a lot with this program – there are tons of filters, effects, and titling options, including “3D titles”. Oh, and there is even 3D video editing too. If you have two video streams, say from identical side by side cameras, you can stitch them together to make a red/blue (glasses) 3D video to play on your computer or your TV. Can’t wait ’til have time to try that out.
Overall, so far, I am very pleased. The regular price is $99 for the “Pro” version. The program delivers capabilities costing far more than that from other vendors.
Magix merged with Xara, the UK company that makes several programs for graphic design, photo editing, web layout and more. I own the Xara Xtreme designer and like it quite a bit. It is inexpensive and does most everything the “really expensive” packages do.
Recording video direct to Mac hard disk (updated)
I have re-written this original post. I discovered that upgrading to Snow Leopard destroyed my ability to record from a Firewire HDV camera direct to the Macbook. Apple has buried in a support note on their web site that this, apparently, previously relied on Final Cut Pro native HDV support. As of Snow Leopard, support for Final Cut Pro 5.1 was terminated and all users, especially those using HDV, must upgrade to FCP 6 or the newest version 7.
However, it appears there is still a work around to make this work, without any version of Final Cut needed for basic HDV capture live from the camera. And it even works with the new Quicktime X installed by Snow Leopard. (FYI – the older version of Quicktime Pro, if you had it, is moved to the Applications / Utilities folder so you can still use that too).
What you need to do
Go to Perian.org and download and install Perian on your system.
Go to this university web site and download the Perian HDV and MPEG2 components. These are ZIP files. Double click to unzip the PerianHDV.component file and the PerianMPEG2.component file.
Using Finder, navigate to the Library / Quicktime folder. Move the above two component files into the Quicktime folder.
Launch Quicktime X.
Choose File / New Movie Recording
When it starts, it shows the view from the built in iSight camera (if on a Macbook notebook). On the bottom of the screen are the video record controls. At the right hand side there is an inverted triangle. Click on that. This shows a pop up menu with a selection for Camera, Microphone and Quality. Select your camera, then select your camera also for the Microphone, and then set Quality to High. In “High”, Quicktime will capture your video in the HDV native format. Captured video will be saved to the folder listed in the “Save to” pop up menu item; you can change that if you want.
Then select the Red record button to record your video.
After capturing the video clips, I imported them into Final Cut Pro 5.1, which I have on my notebook. FCP gave a warning about these clips not being optimized for FCP, what ever that means, but I was able to drag them into the project timeline and edit without any problems. I assume this would likely work in FCP 3.5 HD also, if you don’t have version 4.
Sure wish I could have figured this out before last Saturday. Then, I did do some recording direct to disk using a work around of importing through iMovie. But this was gawd awful. I fed the live Firewire video into iMovie and captured the video. If you turn off the camera before stopping the iMovie capture, iMovie crashes. If you do it right, iMovie than starts creating “thumbnail” images. Which took 4 to 7 minutes for each clip! I didn’t have that much time before I had to start recording the next event!
I had to use Force Quit to kill iMovie, then restart iMovie and set up the capture all over again.
iMovie does not capture in native format either – it transcodes to AIC format and your 13 GB/hour HDV video grows to about 40 or more GB/hour, quickly using up your hard disk space.
While this work around using Perian will let you capture native HDV on your Mac notebook, you will still need either Final Cut to edit the native HDV file, or you can import to iMovie – which will then transcode in to AIC and make the file bigger.
Apple’s success seems to be causing them to turn into Microsoft in terms of their deleting functionality during upgrades and not adequately testing software, like iMovie.