Archive for the ‘Video Production Tips’ Category

Livestream announced a new mobile system, that fits in a backpack.  It lets you plug your HD camera into the gear in the backpack so that you can film and transmit in real time.  Their gear uses 3 different 3g carriers at the same time.

Feature set

• Turnkey hardware solution available today directly from Livestream
• Built-in wireless connection, encoder, battery and touch screen
• Six load-balanced 3G/EVDO modems included with data contract
• Power up, plug in any DV camera and press one button to go live
• Highest Quality – Up to 1 Mbps H.264
• Ideal for sporting events, city hall meetings, paparazzi, university graduations, transmission from a moving car, weddings, ceremonies and a variety of enterprise applications.

The battery pack and spare can give you up to 6 hours of constant HD streaming capabilities.

Pricing

This year my wife has been working to complete her National Boards and the video requirement has been very problematic.  In general the National Board Requirements for video are out of the dark ages.  They require 15 minutes of uncut and unedited video.  The reason for this is that they don’t want a teacher to cherry pick the best portions of their work in the classroom.

The problem is that there is a reason why video needs to be edited from time to time, especially when you are filming in less than ideal circumstances like a grade school classroom.

The video taping process requires at least one assistant and probably two for the teacher that is being filmed.  My wife has gone through 2 rounds attempting to get video and problems came up in both sessions that made the video unusable.  At most she was able to get 9 minutes of usable video at a time, which was under the 15 minute minimum.  She had many segments of this size but none totaling 15 minutes.  She even ran 2 cameras at the same time hoping that one of the cameras might get something useful.

The biggest problem was audio.

My wife had her class room arranged so that her kids would sit in 4 groups.  She teaches 4th grade in a title I school and this particular class can barely sit still and never completely silent.

Throughout the video as she goes group to group it is almost impossible to get video with audio of the group that she is focusing on during the project being filmed due to the group talk of the children in the other groups.

Running a video camera with the built in microphone is just not an option as it picks up too much. 

We tried using a directional microphone and had some better results, but the requirements do not allow a separate audio feed that could later be edited into the video.  This means that the microphone has to be plugged in to the camera and carried by the teacher.

The purpose of this video is to measure the teacher’s teaching skills not their ability to work in front of a camera and manage and practice good mic skills.

After reviewing yet another batch of videos that just didn’t work, I did some research and found some information on using a boom microphone or a microphone on a boom pole.  Using a painting roller pole I was able to fashion a crude but relatively effective boom pole.

So the next time, we’ll go in and have one person working a boom microphone and another person will work the camera.  This should get the job done and enable the microphone to be managed by someone other than the teacher in hopes that the audio will be usable, but this process and the requirements that go with it are archaic and working to prove the Heisenberg and Schroedinger’s Cat principles more than they are proving or disproving the effectiveness of the teacher.

YouTube has been elevated to such heights by its own success, that you may not have come across these 4 other video services.  There from 4 of the biggest (sometimes legacy) names on the internet, Yahoo!, MySpace, AOL, and even Google (in case you forgot Google tried to knock off YouTube before throwing in the towel and buying YouTube itself.

The thing is almost all of these services (like YouTube btw) screw with the compression of your video.  Ergo, you can create a perfectly good looking video on your computer, upload it to their site and they will recompress it in a different format.  What this means is that your video will often be distorted when you use any of these services.

Its kind of like if you take silly puddy and roll it out like cookie dough on a newspaper photograph of the Main Street USA.  The image of the photograph will be captured on the silly puddy.  Then you take the silly puddy and hand it to a three year old, who proceeds to stretch the picture into some new frame size and before you know it you are looking at a pixelated las vegas strip in puddy.

That’s kind of like what these services do as they attempt to fit videos that you load up of dimension A with shape B, into Shape C with dimension D.

Here are a few examples of the unfortunate results that I found with these services:

Yahoo!

MySpace

Google Video

In the Google example, if you embed the video its going to be significantly different than if you view it on the actual site. 

AOL

So here’s a tip, quadruple check your spellings!

This is going to be an atypical holiday season for many many people.  Budgets and wallets and credit lines are tight everywhere, and Santa is still paying his gas bill from last year. Things just won’t be the same as people start to get into the holiday shopping spirit whether you compare prices like crazy when you are online shopping.

ShopandConfess and eBillme started a year long contest last February that seems to be in a sweet spot going into the holidays today.

Considering that many people are seeing their credit card credit lines dropped, halved and squeezed the eBillme model now makes a lot more sense, but regardless the chance to win $1,500 (in November or December) or the Grand Prize of $15,000 is looking a lot sweeter too!

If you place an entry into the contest, please consider referring our site (top10tech.com)    We’d like to see you win, and know that we helped make Christmas a little easier on your finances.

For those of you looking into ways to use video to get your message across the web or kick of a great campaign, this is a terrific example of how to do it right, and also how to plant that seed early (feb 2008) and be at the right place at the right time never hurts either! 

Here’s that contest link one more time.

Pamela Recording for Skype is a great little tool for recording your skype calls.  The basic version is free and will record 15 minutes of a Skype conversation.

The standard version will record 30 minutes of conversation at a time at a cost of $14.95 US. The professional and the business versions will record an unlimited amount of a call in to run the option of recording Skype video and Skype chats along with building in the podcasting system and blogging systems.

All versions of the product are available in a free trial for 30 days!

This tool comes highly recommended by both Podcasters and professional voice artists. It is relatively inexpensive and offers a number of other bonus options that will be useful for many people especially the answering machine options. At prices ranging from $0-$45.  At about 1/6th of the price of lower end Movado watches,  it’s not terribly expensive. If you’re looking to do a podcast, or capture a brainstorm during a Skype call, then this tool could be invaluable.

I’ve tried many other applications, that were offered as free downloads, or charged just a few dollars, and most of them have been ripoffs. If you find one that works better than this for a better price, let me know. Until then, this is the one that I recommend.

Image via Wikipedia

Last January I wrote an article about a simple video converter program.  I bought it back then after using it during a free trial.  I had bought a mini-dvd camcorder and needed something to convert video files from VRO to AVI so I could edit them on my computer.  It definitely worked for that!

Later, though I started using it to do all sorts of video conversions, converting files downloaded from YouTube to more useful file formats to create mashups for example.

They have changed the name from AVS Video Converter to AVS4You and you get more under the new name than you used to.

I used it to convert video file formats from one file type to another, and changed the compression and frame rates and even audio settings to make file sizes, post conversion smaller and lots lots more.

Now way back then, they used to sell individual components of the program for each little thing you wanted to do.  These days they have basically bundled them all together into one big package and they charge about the same price as I paid way back then for a single component. 

Bad for me, for over paying back then , good for you as you can save money now, after you have had a chance to test drive it even!

Now, they don’t emphasize the free trial so much any more, but it is still available in a different flavor.

Excerpt from my original Article back in January

How Does it Work?

I can simply remove a mini-dvd from my camera (either a DVD-RAM or a DVD-R or a DVD-RW, and pop it into my computer.

The converter can then view the VRO or the associate IFO directory and convert the VRO file into a large number of file formats.

VRO, MPG, VOB, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG, DVD, RM, 3GP, MOV, 3G2, QT, SWF, DV AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DAT, VCD, SVCD, RMVB, ASF, MJPEG, H.263, DVR-MS, H.264

And maybe a few more.

Convert VRO to AVI with AVS Video Converter – Free Trial | Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Update – AVS Video Converter Works Great for converting Aiptek HD video in .MOV format to .avi format for production in Sony Vegas

In 2009 I purchased an Aiptek HD video camera. It captures video in .mov format. I have been learning to work with Sony Vegas lately, and the version of .mov that the Aiptek camera uses is not compatible with Sony Vegas. You can import the video to Vegas, but the sound does not come in. I have successfully used AVS Video Converter to convert my .mov files to .avi with AVS Video converter so that I can then work with the files in Sony Vegas or even in Pinnacle Studio, my former preferred video editing software (that crashes a bit too much).

This tool rocks and should be about as popular as Phentermine without prescription at a night club in LA.

A few months back, I wrote an article listing a half dozen plus different software programs that can be used to download movies from YouTube and many other sites.

Although, I prefer other tools for getting at videos from most other non-YouTube sites, TubeSucker rocks at downloading YouTube videos easily, quickly and best of all, making it possible to convert them to different file formats.

Its great if you want to provide a video response to someone on YouTube and use part of their clip in the response as if to quote them or even mock them if that is your game.

But it can also be very handy if you want to lift a track off a video and put it on a new one too.  Just download the video from youtube and convert the track to an mp3 file and bingo, you have music!

This week I did a hard drive upgrade on my laptop and afterwards, my registration on some of my programs had to be re-registered.

This included all of my adobe products and my favorite video conversion tool, AVS Video Converter known today as AVS Video Tools.

They still have the free trial download!

If you happen to lose track of your registration number (AVG antivirus made me lose mine (explanation below)) you can request a new one via the email address you used to order the product.

Simply go to the address above and it will walk you through the short process to get your registration code sent yet again.

AVG Antiviru Hid My Registration Code

For some reason the registration code is sent in an html  or image format that AVG antivirus dislikes.

So the email with the registration number becomes invisible when AVG is running on your inbox when the message comes in.  I had to turn the program off, then re-request the registration through a new email so that I could see it and use the registration number.

I found a tip that pointed me in the right direction here.  I still had to figure out how to solve my particular problem, but this confirmed my suspicion that my antivirus software was the possible culprit.

All I could see in my email (that I could read prior to installing AVG antivirus) was the following:

So now that I have that figured out, what I meant to do (convert a quick video over an hour ago) can be finished. 

This evening I am working on upgrading my preferred video editing software Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 11 to Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12.  Despite the flaky and very long name, the software works well for me.

Kind of….

I have to throw out the caveat that I use Pinnacle all the time and it is a huge improvement over working with the free software Windows Movie Maker, which is kind of like saying that working with any given word processor is better than working with Notepad.

Seriously, I have definitely gotten much more out of Pinnacle 11 than I paid for, but the software in the version 11 did tend to crash and hang a lot.  Especially, when I started the program up, it would often hang as it loaded files into run.

Fortunately, I never lost any work from a software crash, so it wasn’t something I curse terribly much.  However, as I move from version 11 to version 12, I am seriously hoping that the crashes and hangs will end and that version 12 will be a much more stable and reliable program.

I definitely can not complain about the price, which is relatively cheap – under $100 and comes with many features that definitely can save a person a great deal of time if they do a lot of video editing.  These days I am doing a lot of video editing and therefore, paying another $100 for the upgrade will very likely pay for itself within a week if not within the first day.

One thing I should mention, if you are not upgrading yourself, I do highly recommend getting the Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Movie Box version on your first buy.  It may cost you an extra $5 – $15, but it comes with a video adapter device and a green screen kit.  If you are the type of person that prefers to download a program as opposed to go to a store or even order through Amazon, this may crimp your style a bit, but the extras that come with this out of the box are probably worth the hassle and the $5 – 15 bucks even though you may forego the best buy possible online.

There are many points in creating and editing video for the web where by a video can get hossed up. 

Hoss being a technical term from TV Western’s for the application of Murphy’s Law.

The points that affect the quality of a video include but are not limited to the following:

1. The quality of the camera lens shooting the video
2. The quality of the media recording the video in the camera
3. The quality of the stream that sends the video out of the camera and into a streaming capture device
4. The quality of the capture program that converts the stream into video
5. The settings and codecs for 2,3,4 above
6. Then there is the site where you upload the video too!

Those sites usually have a standard size that they prefer to display a video within.

If you make a large video (using simple numbers that are not used on actual uploads), that is 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels and a website uses a standard player of say 400 x 300, when you upload your video and play it in that size its going to get mixed down to a quality level for the width of 400 and the height is going to be disproportionately shrunk.

If a user plays that player and then expands it to full screen (even to a manually adjusted size of 1000 x 1000) the actual video will still have the quality of 400 x 300.  So the expanded video will not appear pixelated.

Sometimes you can even hoss things up with conversions.  When you edit the video and then render it new, you might change settings around or depending on your editing software you may bring the video in at one setting and accidentally mix it back out again at a different setting. 

All of these things can create an end result where the video is not as sharp as what you see!

Here’s an example of a video that I screwed the pooch on about 6 ways to sunday:

My apologies for the auto play, blame CNN, look at the bright side at least its just sound and not some troll throwing marketing pens at you through your monitor.