Digital Moviemaking 39: Too Many Options

Classes start up again next week, and it’s also now only about six weeks away from the submission deadline for the 8th annual Forx Film Fest, to be held this year the first weekend of November at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks. Not long after that is the deadline to submit to the 2010 Fargo Film Festival.

With the increasing availability and decreasing prices of digital video equipment over the past decade, more and more people are making their own movies, and for the past several years I’ve done periodic columns with suggestions how to make your own movies more easily and to appear more professional than a simple home movie.

This time I’ll talk more about equipment, as choices have expanded drastically and shifted somewhat since home digital camcorders were first introduced in the 1990s, gradually displacing analog video cameras (which are still around). The old standard of the 1980s-90s was VHS tape, and then the more compact 8mm and Hi8 tape cassettes caught on with many people. Any editing had to be done by re-recording the scenes you wanted tape-to-tape in the order you wanted them.

Then computer editing software simplified the process, if you had a “capture card” that could convert your audio-video signal to a digital file. Often these were done at a lower image quality because most computers ten years ago were too slow to play back the full quality in real time.

Soon after, “Digital 8” camcorders were introduced that used the same tape cassettes as the analog Hi8 tapes but recorded a digital signal. This did not need to be converted by a computer, but simply transferred (“captured”) from the tapes to the computer’s hard drive. “Mini DV” tapes recorded the identical digital signal on tapes about half the size, and quickly moved from a home movie format to a semi-professional standard.

New software allowed captured or edited movies to be converted to the standard DVD format for easier playback on other people’s TVs. Faster data processors, “firewire” connections, and faster, cheaper hard drives made it practical for editing full-length feature movies on average home computers.

New, improved digital compression formats allowed more information to be stored in less space. Camcorders came along that recorded directly to DVDs, so footage did not need to be captured and converted to the DVD format. Then came camcorders that recorded directly to miniature hard drives or even more compact memory cards that could be plugged directly into a computer.

The a/v files might be edited directly or dragged to the computer’s own hard drive with no need to capture the files in real time, a great time-saving convenience. Then the camcorder’s mini hard drive or memory card could be erased to be used over again. While this seems the logical best way to go, and tapeless production is indeed the wave of the future, there are a number of drawbacks that make video tape (mainly mini DV) a preferred format for beginning independent moviemakers.

The biggest drawback to using camcorders that record to DVDs, memory cards or hard drives is the wide variety of non-standardized digital compression formats, all of which were designed to play back audio and video conveniently, some for quick upload to the internet, but none of them to be edited.

Camcorders that record video to DVD, hard drives, or memory cards as MPEG, AVC, or other files require specialized editing software. They are not recommended for anything other than simple home movies you never expect to edit. While the initial image may look acceptable, picture quality can decrease substantially during the editing process due to file decompression and recompression.

High-definition home camcorders can produce impressively sharp original pictures, but can pose major problems when trying to edit the footage on typical home computers, and even more problems re-encoding it to a standard-resolution copy that can be played by others. There are so many competing hi-def recording formats that it is safer to stick with standard DV for at least another year or more, until home BluRay authoring software becomes available.

If you want to edit your footage at all (or without extreme frustration), getting a hi-def tapeless camcorder will also require you to have the newest, fastest computers available, with the latest software that supports all the new formats that keep coming out.

And of course, if you do not shoot on tape, you’ll need to keep buying expensive new memory cards and/or hard drives to store your original footage. “Old-fashioned” digital tape can be delicate and wear out with constant use, but it is a far more reliable storage medium to back up your valuable footage. Computer hard drives have a tendency to crash and/or corrupt files at the most inopportune moments, destroying all your work and losing your footage forever unless you still have the original tapes.

Note that editing with an older computer may require you to use a lower-resolution image than you actually shot (especially if you have a hi-def camcorder) in order to see the action in real time without jerkiness. This will look acceptable only in very small images like those used on the web or iPods. Try to edit at “full-quality” if at all possible, or your final DVD will be disappointing.

Note that when using full DV quality, most computers and editing software (especially low-end software like Windows Moviemaker and Mac’s iMovie) will work best with movies shorter than five minutes, and may have difficulties with a movie longer than ten minutes or so. This is due to the way they capture footage into one huge file, letting the software recognize the individual shots, instead of breaking each shot into a separate, smaller file.

Always export your whole project back to tape and/or as one large full-quality DV file to your hard drive. A DV file will be about six times larger than a DVD-format mpeg file and is substantially higher quality than a DVD version. Always make backups to more than one hard drive, and ALWAYS export a copy back to a digital tape!

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)