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Thursday 11 April 2002

 
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MORE BREAD

The bread maker has a timer, so I can wake up to a freshly-baked loaf. Yummy! :-)

I've had a problem, with the bread collapsing once the heat starts. It doesn't affect the taste. Anyway, I've reduced the amount of yeast and this loaf rose really well as you can see.

Call me a cynic but I think manufacturers tend to tell us to use too much of their product (whatever it might be). That way they sell more...

Or maybe when baking in a bread maker you simply need less yeast than in an traditional oven?

VIDEO EXPERIMENTS

Lots more experiments too, putting together videos on the PC. In fact I've spent most of the last week on this, learning how to improve the look of stuff on VHS and the best compression techniques to use.

You may not have heard of the VCD (Video CD) format. I didn't know much about it until recently. It gives an hour of VHS quality video on a standard CD. It's popular in Asia where feature films come on two VCD discs. But it never really caught on in Europe where VHS tapes were more popular.

But the really exciting part is that most DVD players can play a VCD. So I'm looking at this as a way of releasing a couple of video projects that I'm working on. And the great thing is that even my puny-specification PC is up to encoding video that is suitable for a VCD.

MAKING MOVIES OVER THE YEARS

I started making movies when I was 15 years old. As a teenager I was desperate to get myself a film camera and projector. But I didn't manage it until I got myself a job after school.

Those were the days of Super 8 film. A roll of flm lasted 3 minutes 20 seconds and cost £3-£4 -- which was a lot of money to me back then. I wanted to do some animation and I did -- but the truth is I never really had the patience for it and found live-action much more to my liking.



My Super 8 camera (still got it!)
With Super 8, editing the visuals was easy -- you just cut up the film and stuck it back together. The problem was mixing together any kind of soundtrack and getting it synchronised with the picture. The system I used involved perforated 1/4 inch reel-to-reel audio tape, a strobe light and a gadget that controlled the speed of the film projector!

Then, in 1980, home video came along -- VHS and Betamax -- and I rented a £1000 so-called portable system and paid for it each month by making videos of weddings.

Great: synchronised picture and sound and cheap minute-for-minute, but not easy to edit. You had to copy from one video machine to another, with a loss of quality when you did.


Editing 16mm film

You couldn't guarantee to cut on a particular frame and, ermmm, mixing soundtracks wasn't that easy either. But I did manage to put together at least one good documentary.

At this point I went off and studied film and TV production at University for three years. Once I'd used professional-quality 16mm film and broadcast TV equipment, it made the restrictions thrown up by home video seem even worse!

Tools for digital video

CAPTURE CARD
You need a video capture card. Mine is an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 that I picked up cut-price for £35. It has a video out socket that lets you view material on your TV or record it onto tape. The software that comes with this card is terrible but the card itself works pretty well.

CAPTURE/PROCESSING
Lots of software lets you capture but VirtualDub (freeware) does it best of all and has many cool filters to process and improve your footage. For instance, you can remove grain or colour noise.

EDITING
Adobe Premiere is my software of choice, but is ridiculously expensive. ABC VideoRoll is the best free software.

ENCODING TO MPEG
The MPEG format offers great compression with good image and sound quality. TMPGEnc (shareware) produces high-quality MPG files, including those suitable for making a VCD. TMPGEnc is unrestricted for MPG1 encoding, which is the format used in VCDs.

MAKING A VCD
WinOnCD 5 Power Edition (£40) - an easy way to make a VCD. It encodes the video files to MPG1 format and you can include audio and stills and make menus. Great!
Again, various gadgets appeared to improve the accuracy of editing with home equipment. But it was still a long, long way from even basic professional expectations. So, wherever possible, I got myself onto pro equipment and did my editing on that rather than at home.

ON AN EQUAL FOOTING AT LONG LAST?

The current moment in history is very exciting for anyone who is into making their own movies and who has been struggling to do so for years...

PC prices have dropped, and technology has developed, to the point where editing can all be done on a PC and broadcast-quality results can be had using a system that costs just £1500. Even a basic PC can produce VHS quality.

No more hassle getting sync sound or mixing soundtracks. No problems achieving frame-accurate cuts or the same effects that are available to the pros (picture and sound mixes, blue-screen, superimposed moving titles...).

Add in the Internet or CD as a means of easy distribution for your finished film -- and it's just wonderful!

Of course this doesn't mean that everyone is suddenly going to begin producing their own movies. In much the same way as most people are able to write, but never get down to writing a book. There is much more to film-making than the nuts and bolts of editing and most people don't want to spend the time learning about it.

However, it does mean that if you have the will, then for the first time in history you don't need a load of money or the go-ahead from the people who control hugely-expensive production equipment and distribution.
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