Adventures in Video Editing. . .

On Saturday night Sandy and I decided that along with our printed invitations to the boys first birthday party, we would send out a video of the boy's first year. We decided to make a VCD because it would be inexpensive to send (49 cents, same as a large postcard) and could be played in most people's DVD players.

Our decicion to make this video presented me with a series of problems:

1. Our video camera is a Hi-8 model, not digital, so I would need to somehow get the data from my Camera to my PC in order to edit it.
2. We couldn't find the video out cable for the video camera.
   
3. I did not have any video editing software.
4. I had never made a video like this before.

So off I went to Radio Shack to get a video capture device (and video out cable) that could capture the video from my camera and save it on my PC. The device I ended up buying is made by Zio Corporation and it is called a CameraMate. It has video and audio IN jacks and the OUT jack is a USB cable that plugs into the USB port on my PC. It was pretty cheap ~ $70. The software it came with was the most terrible piece of garbage I have ever used in my life. It seemed to install fine, and the instructions it came with seemed straightforward, but when I would load it and it would ask me what my input Audo and Video preferences were, it would crash. I must have rebooted my PC 20 times. Normally I would use something else, but this was all I had! Eventually I got it working somehow and captured all the clips I wanted to use. Then I started trying to work with them in the editor and it started crashing again. I went to bed at 4 A.M. I'd streamed all the video clips I thought were good, and selected the music I wanted for the movie--Queen's These are the Days of Our Lives. That was a good enough start.

The next morning I started editing the movie and this time the software was working better. I figured out how to select a clip, and manipulate the start and stop times of the clip. When I was done, I had to "render" the clip, or save it in a movie format. The problem was that when it was rendering, it would crash. Totally frustrating. The software had a button it that said VCD but it didn't work at all. Finally, I ended up rendering the movie in MPEG-1 format, which made it over 900 MB. This I then converted to AVI format, brought into Microsoft Movie Maker (comes with Windows XP), added some frames at the end to serve as a visual invitation to the party, and saved the file as a movie. Unfortunately, Movie Maker saves it's movies in WMV format, which is pretty proprietary as far as VCD software goes. So I had to converted that back to AVI format. Then I downloaded a program called Nero that was simple and straightforward. I told it I wanted a VCD, clicked on the AVI, and clicked "Burn." Done.

Next time I make a movie I will do it completely different. First of all, I will see if Nero has movie making software, and see if I can get my this CameraMate capture device to work with it. If not, there is a Linux Live-CD (don't need to actually install Linux, you just put in the CD and boot off it and it runs the OS in system memory) called dyne:bolic that is dedicated to multimedia production. If I can't get my capture software to work with that, I may look at having a professional service extract the audio and video data off my Hi-8 tapes so that I can edit them myself. This would no doubt be more expensive in the long run, but would result in much higher quality productions, and would save me wasted hours and frustration.

What did I learn from all this?

• The people at Zio Corporation can't program their way out of a wet paper sack.
• Free Software (I tried lots of VCD tools before finding Nero) is not always the answer.
• Microsoft actually made a nice program when they made Movie Maker.
  
• My kids are really cute and they look great on TV.
• I learned how to made a origami CD-holder which Sandy and I used to send the VCD to everyone.
• Queen is still my favorite band.

And I learned that making movies is fun, even when you've never done it before. If you want to receive a copy of the video, a 5 MB file in WMV (Microsoft Windows Video) format, send an e-mail to kschroe@gmail.com with a subject of "sendvideo#1".