I spent some time Sunday afternoon making a short movie. I shot some video on the camcorder, captured it into Pinnacle Studio 8, edited it, and finally wrote it out on several different media. I made an S-VCD, a Video CD, a DVD, and a Windows Media Player AVI file. It takes a long time to put something together and it was quite the learning experience.
I started by taking about 15 minutes of video in the house, in the back yard, and in the front of the house. After importing it into Pinnacle Studio 8, I then started editing the movie. I didn’t make very many changes, mostly shortening up the clips, taking out long pauses, and such. Most of the clips started too quickly — I need to put more lead-in and lead-out on each clip to allow for room to arrange clips and put transitions or titles between them as needed. The tripod I was using is made primarily for still cameras and I learned it doesn’t work as well for video as I wanted. I’ll be going out to find a better tripod with more fluid movement.
About half the video has shot hand-held, so it jumps around too much. There’s too much pan and zoom in the video as well. After I make two or three of these, I should start learning what works and what doesn’t.
Editing took a long time, mostly because I was learning the program at the same time. When I tried to put titles and chapters (a menu) in place, that didn’t work very well at all. That needs to be the very last thing done and isn’t all that straight forward. The program has a large number of transitions to put between clips, but I ended up taking most of them out as they were too distracting. I didn’t try to put any music behind the video — that’s a future task.
It takes a long time to render and write out the resulting video. I ended up with thirteen minutes of video — not all that long. Writing it to a DVD took more than an hour. Writing a Windows Media Player (AVI) file took even longer. Since DVD’s cost about $1.50 for each blank disk and CD’s cost about $0.25 apiece, it seemed to make more sense to put this movie onto CD than onto a DVD disk. However, while the CD file plays just fine on my home computer, it is very jerky on my work laptop. The DVD, however, plays just fine. The Video CD won’t play in my DVD player if it’s recorded on CD-R media, but plays just fine if it’s recorded on CD-RW media. Go figure.
But, it’s been fun and educational. I want to take the video camera with us to Alaska in June, so this is the time to learn how the whole system works so maybe I can do something with the video we take on that trip! I can now say, however, that I’ve made my first movie. It won’t get much of a release…. it’s too soon to buy cigars…. what kind of clothes should I wear on the Red Carpet at the Oscars????