The Video Animal’s Cave

In part one we took a look at the first step to post decent quality video to sites such as YouTube, by using a filter to ‘de-interlace’ the footage in order to make the video itself web ready. Today we are going to look at compressing that file to make it small enough to be accepted, and still big enough so that it doesn’t look ugly.

To do that, we will start by figuring out how compression works and then some basic tips and tricks to making compression work for you, instead of against you.

What is compression?

Compression is just what it sounds like. It is taking something large and squeezing it down to make it smaller. When it comes to all things on your computer, compression is a standard way for the computer to take what could be a huge file and make it manageable.

How does compression work?

Compression isn’t a new thing, in fact it has been around since the early days of computing, in forms you might recognize such as ‘winzip’. Understanding how basic computer compression works is pretty easy.

Imagine for a second that data on your computer is like a string of yarn. If you took all the yarn you needed to knit a sweater and laid it all out on the ground it would probably fill the floors of your house. So you perform a type of compression, you ball it all up. You do it in a nice neat way because if you just grabbed it all and stuffed it in a bag it would get all tangled. So instead you slowly ravel it in to a ball so you can get to it as you need it. We do the same thing with data, we roll it in to a neat ball on the hard drive so that it doesn’t get tangled up. The computer does it in such a way that the data flows smoothly, because if we hit to much data at once (like a knot in the yarn) the computer slows down do unravel it all and we get loading or freezing on our computer.

Back to the ball of yarn. If you took that ball and squeezed all the air out of it it would get smaller. You would have ‘compressed it’ If you could keep it that way you could store a lot more balls in a much smaller drawer. This is exactly how digital compression works. It takes all the extra spaces and repeated bits out of a file and replaces it with smaller bits of code so that it can be stored in a smaller space. To do this it uses something called a ‘codec’

Ok, I get it, now what the heck is a codec?

Unlike the ball of yarn you can’t just take all the air out of a bunch of data. It would get messy and unreadable pretty quick. You CAN take out some erroneous and repeated data and replace it with smaller bits. Imagine every space in this paragraph actually takes about 10 bits in the data world. To us it is a space but to a computer it is 001011001. (i made that up.. don’t quote me) If we could replace this data with one simple mark like lets say ‘-’ it would take up less space. The problem is that you need to be able to ‘de-code’ that new mark and tell the computer “Whenever I say ‘-’ I really mean 001011001…ok?” That’s what a codec does. It ‘encrypts’ the extra data, and then uses a special ‘de-coder ring’ do decrypt it in the original larger format so the computer can read it.

So what does that have to do with video?

Digital compression really hit its stride when it left the world of compressing boring old computer files and started dealing with things like music. Back in the 80’s someone had the wild idea that we could take the same idea and apply it to sound. Instead of giving the computer every tiny bit of sound data and getting the computer to reproduce that sound, we could simply use a codec. Boom… we are able to store that data on small disks.. and the CD is born. Eventually we got much better codecs, and now we can store hundreds of songs on a cd using .mp3… all .mp3 is.. is a better codec that is better at compressing the audio data.

However, video was a conundrum. Video is much harder than audio in the grand scheme of things. With video you need to have color information for every pixel on the screen… how do you compress that without seriously altering the image? At first even short videos took up huge chunks of space on hard drives, it seemed like it would never really work.

It must have taken a dreamer to come up with the solution, because the solution lay in the sky. When you film the sky it stays a nice even blue, and if you have a steady hand, it will stay on the screen for a long time, in the same place. AHAA!!
What if instead of saying to the pixel ‘i need the color blue’ 30 times every second, we said ‘i need the color blue here for the next 800 frames’? If we could do that we could save a lot of space! Bammo! Video codec was born. The first place consumers really saw codecs at work was on DVD’s. DVD’s use an older codec called MPEG-2. Since then the codecs keep getting better, and now we have codecs that can do HD video on the same size of disk.

It took a long time to get right, and has really only become a viable technology in the last 10 or so years. But when we did get it right it revolutionized everything! When video and computers learned to play together nicely it opened up a new age of digital video and effects work, and suddenly directors could make movies like ‘300′ and ‘Titanic’… but thats another story.

Ok…so what does it all mean to me?

Understand codecs and you understand how to get good quality video on the web. Codecs are always improving and are not created equal. Old codecs do substandard jobs and eventually become defunct. Some codecs improve constantly but not all computers will have access to them. You need to strike a balance between quality and availability. Find a codec that does a good job but that everyone can see on their screen. The problem is that there are a lot of codecs out there.

Apple supports a program called ‘Quicktime’ that has been around a long time. Quicktime is a piece of software that can read and compress several codecs. It is the standard in the video industry. You can spot a quicktime file when it has the tag ‘.mov’ at the end of it such as ‘mymovie.mov’. Microsoft has their own program ‘.wmv’ and flash has it’s own video codec ‘.flv’ (often called a ‘flash video file) The secret behind why these programs survive while others die is actually because they are a combination of codecs all contained within a singe reader. A ‘quicktime’ player can read 20 or so codecs that all have that same ‘.mov’ tag. Whenever a new codec is developed by the folks at apple (or they buy someone elses work) they add it to their codec ‘reader’. Think of it like a family. Different people, but all with the same last name. The actual ‘codec’ it is using could be called something like ‘mpeg-2′, but to make it easy for the consumer they lumped it in to ‘.mov’ so that you only need to download one piece of software to read it.

I get it, geeze, get on to explaining how it works!

So you made your video of your ‘gnarly whitewater run’ and you want to post it for the world to see. You de-interlaced it because some goober on the internet told you to, and now you are ready to kick it out of your editing software and post it. So you click on ‘export’ and you give it a name and there it is on your desktop.. but holy crap!!! the file is 5 gigs! You take a deep breath and wade in to the ‘advanced settings’ tab of your video editing software and you are confronted with all kinds of options… you click on ‘video for web’ and it exports to your desktop.. phew! the file is only 10 kilobytes! You click on it to watch it and… what the hell??? The video is the size of a thumb and so blurry you can’t see your gnarly whitewater run any more!!

Don’t panic. You understand the basics of compression and can now start to make compression work for you!

Step 1: Before you do anything you need to find out what formats are supported by the site you plan to use. YouTube currently supports WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG formats.

Step 2: Find out what the biggest file possible is. In the case of you tube that is currently 1024 mb and can be a maximum of 10 minutes in length.

Step 3: Leave the relative comfort of presets and venture in to the world of advanced compression!

I’m ready! … wait a second … what the hell are all these settings… help!!!

I am going to assume you are using Final Cut. (Sorry folks with premier, Don’t worry, a lot of this stuff will work the same fundamental way)

If you are using a basic editing program such as iMovie or windows movie maker, you won’t have as many options. The solution is to export it in all the different formats that the program will allow. Take a look at the size of the file, watch the movie and see how the quality is, and upload the one that has the right codec type, the best quality and is under your ‘file size limit’. (delete the ones you aren’t using because you can fill up a hard drive quickly)

If you are using Final Cut or a similar program it is time to open up the advanced settings for exporting your file. In the case of Final Cut.. it’s time to open up (duhn duhn duhn) “Compressor”. (File>Export>Export using Compressor)

The advantage to compressor is that you can preview the size of the file you are going to get after you export. This is super handy as it will let you play with the settings until you can get under the ‘maximum file size’ limit, while allowing you to play with the frame size and quality of your video. It even allows you to preview what the video will look like after compression, so you don’t get a nasty surprise after you have let it work at a file for 5 hours.

How do I make the file smaller?

There are a few different settings you can play with that will quickly make the file size smaller.

1. Frame size- If the video takes up less space on the screen, the file will have to deal with less pixels.. less pixels, smaller file size
2. Quality- This is sort of a ‘catch all’ setting. The lower the quality of the image, the more compression you are allowing the codec to do. Heavy compression will give you smaller files, but you may not be as impressed with the result
3. Bit Rate- We’ll talk about this more in a second, but lower the bit rate and you lower the file size.. and also,again, the quality.
4. Codec- some codecs will produce smaller files. In this case I generally recommend sticking with quicktime compression in h.264 codec, unless your posting site doesn’t support .mov files.. which is pretty unlikely, but does happen.

The bad news is that I can’t really just give you a simple solution here.

I can’t say.. just hit these three buttons and you will get perfect quality video ready for the web. You need to play with these settings, get to know them and alter them depending on the video. Slowly striking a balance between file size and image quality. I can tell you that the ‘web streaming’ options give you decent quality video, makes sure that the video doesn’t stutter too much and will resize it nicely.

To see how the video is affected by your choices, click on the ’summary’ option in the inspector while you have the setting highlighted in the ‘Batch’ window. You can see that is shows the ‘estimated file size.’ Now all you have to do is play with the settings until you can get the file size small enough, while still being comfortable with the quality of the image!

The real key to playing with compression is playing with the ‘data rate’. Remember our ball of yarn? The data rate is the rate that the yarn is fed to the net. (or in this case..data) Imagine the internet is a series of tubes.. oh crap.. I can’t believe I just said that… I mean…

Imagine the amount of data that you can get from the internet at any one time is like a pipeline to your computer. The pipe has a diameter and can only feed so much data to the computer at any one time. Let’s say your computer has a data rate of 1000 kilobytes per second. If we try to feed more than that at any one time the pipe gets clogged up for a bit… and the video will freeze up as the computer tries to sort out the data and get the next chunk it needs. If we make sure that the video never exceeds this 1000kb/second, the video will always play smoothly! Your compressor is capable of making sure that the video is compressed enough to always do that!

The second advantage is that if you play with the data rate it will severely increase or decrease the size of the file after compression! The lower the data rate.. the smaller the file. As always, this will be at the cost of image quality. The higher the data rate.. the higher the quality of your video!

Anyway, thats it for this week. I think I have left you with more than enough to work on. I hope to have time to fiddle a bit with ‘Premier’ and be able to add a part two to this post for those of you without Final cut. All in all I am sure many of the concepts are the same and it will be up to you to fiddle with the settings.

Good Luck!

Next week we will discuss frame size in more detail, a brief word on pixelation and finally, look at how to add letter boxing to your video!

Until then, feedback is always appreciated. If anyone out there is a Premier guru and can give some options for web video, pass it on!

The Animal

A

Posted by videoanimal

A huge amount of the video produced nowadays is going to be posted to the net. Video sharing services like YouTube make it simple and free to get video out to the world and on to your webpage. It’s pretty easy to do it well and make it look good if you know what you are doing.

So, you edited a 10 minute clip to advertise your up and coming film and you want to post it to the net. If you try to post the highest quality version you will find that most video posting sites will bounce it back at you because it is simply to large. You would think fisong the problem would be as easy as doing an output in a lower quality, and, that will work.. however, there are a few tricks to doing it so that your video is small enough to post, AND, still looks good.

To help out we will be doing a three part article on understanding the basics of how web ready video works. Starting this week with an article on ‘Interlace vs. progressive’ Video, and followed by a look at compressiona and we will wrap it all up in a couple of weeks with an article on pixels and size issues.. including how to letterbox your video.

Interlacing? What is it… and for that matter.. what the heck is ‘progessive scan’??

Before you output your video (using quicktime or compressor or whatever software you use to make the file) there is a simple step that will solve a whole heck of a lot of problems. You need to ‘De-interlace’.

We can go in to a lot of detail here, and there are huge primers out there that help explain this in detailed technical terms for you… but lets try to explain this whole ‘interlacing’ debaucle simply.

TV screens (traditionally) work different than computer monitors. TV screens use a system called ‘Interlacing’. Simply, interlacing uses two lights to scan an image on to a screen, and before it is finished scanning the first image, the second ‘light gun’ starts on the next image in the series, and before that second ‘gun’ is finished it’s job, the first ‘gun’ starts on the next image.. and so on and so on. By weaving (or ‘interlacing’)those two images together TV’s can scan up to 29.97 images on the screen per second giving the illusion of motion. This is all due to that ability to ‘interlace’ (or at least it was until the technology changed in the last 20 years). Film accomplishes the same feat by flicking 24 full screen images per second on the screen. 24 frames per second (or FPS in film terms) is pretty much the minimum required to fool the human eye in to seeing things move. Although interlacing allows us to put more images up on the screen in a second, film is more ‘true’ to nature, and in the process of interlacing we take away the clarity of the image by spacing it out with the next image in the series. Televisions work like a printer, printing one line at a time, and there are only so many lines it can put on a screen, when we interlace it we use half those lines for one image, and half for the next… if we could use all the lines everything would be higher definition.

A computer monitor on the other hand , doesn’t use interlacing. When computers where developed the technology had improved and the computer didn’t need to show that many images a second. Computers used a different type of technology called ‘progressive scan’. In this case, it worked more like a film, it put up a new image as it was needed, at a maximum speed of about 30 fps. Once again, we can go in to a lot of detail here, but this simple explanation will do what is required.

That technology was slowly improved upon over the years and as it got better we could squish more and more lines on the screen and more and more colors, eventually the ‘progressive scan’ computer monitor could show television images. Eventually video could be shown on a computer monitor the same as film.. and now we have cameras that can shoot in progressive scan. However… the problem is that most video technology, hasn’t caught up, and we are left with some of the relics of the TV age. On top of that, HD video also uses interlacing, so that it can show 60 images per second, giving HD superior image quality. Now we have a huge variety of camcorders and screens that all use different image standards… NTSC video is shown at 29.97 fps interlaced, HD video can be shown at 30 fps progressive (30p) or at 60 fps interlaced (60i) or even at 60 fps progressive (the holier than though 60p!). When you shop for televisions they will tell you how many lines of resolution (the printer analogy again here.. think of it as light guns printing on the screen) and whether it is a progressive or interlaced device. Confused yet?? Ignore that for now, all you need to know is that most video, including your HD video is shot interlaced. If it isn’t, you have probably already done the research or read one of my other articles on progressive scan HD camcorders.

Note: There is an ongoing debate whether 30p (30 fps progressive scan) image quality is better than 60i (60 fps interlaced) and I will leave that up to you. (although personally I find 30p looks nicer on screen… more like film)

Great.. now what does all this have to do with YouTube?

You will notice the difference if you throw a dvd in to your computer and watch it on your computer monitor, it will look like little lines appear whenever someone on screen moves too quickly. We call all these extra lines and any glitches left behind ‘artfacts’. These particular artifacts are because the computer is showing two interlaced images at a time on a progressive computer screen. The computer screen was never designed to handle it and just shows both images at once! It is tolerable when watching a dvd on a plane, but you run in to issues when you pass interlaced footage on to YouTube to post for you… or take this image and try to compress it down in to a smaller frame or file size.

We will talk about compression types in more detail in the next article, but for now all you need to know is that when you compress an image that already has extra, unneeded lines of screen junk.. such as those artifacts left over from the interlaced image, the compression gets worse… it has to deal with the artifacts and it usually does it badly.

So how do we fix it?

The best way is to use a ‘de-interlace’ filter. Every decent editing program has one. In Final Cut you will find it under ‘Video Filters-Image Control’ and you should definatly keep it in your favorites box if you plan on doin a lot of video for the web. I would be hard pressed to imagine that any other decent video editing software wouldn’t contain the same sort of filter. It may take a bit of hunting, but I assure you.. it is there.

All you do is drag it on to your video clips like any other filter and render. No fuss, no muss. This Filter takes out the extra lines from the image and turns it in to a progressive scan image with a 30fps framerate, just like your computer screen. It literally takes one of the two images on screen and tosses it away. Tada! Now your footage is really at 30fps! Suddenly.. your clip will look that much better… and if your original image is clearer, it will look clearer when you compress it in to a web ready version.

The other option (but not nearly as good) to fix the problem is de-interlace when you compress the video. Most video compression software will have a ‘de-interlace’ option that will do much the same thing as the filter for you. However, for the best results, use the filter in your editing software and then export (compress) the file. The compressor has enough to work on without having to deal with the interlacing, and the filter in your editing software is generally a higher quality.

So remember… rule of thumb. If your video is going to the internet, make it web ready by de-interlacing it. One simple step that makes it all that much clearer.

If you want to learn more about how all this interlacing/progressive/web video stuff works, I recommend starting with Adobe’s video compression primer. I really tried to keep the information simple here, so there is a lot more to it, and I changed a few numbers to make things clearer. If you really want to know how it all works, Read the primer.

Next week we will talk about compression and how it works.

The Animal

This week I would like to talk about accessories. There are a ton of gadgets and gizmos out there. They are shiny and cool looking and you will want to get them for christmas.

What else do I need to get started?

Lets start with the one thing we all take for granted, and often forget to buy

Tripods

There is a big debate among photographers and video nuts like myself as to how much money you should spend on your tripod. The range is insane, from 20 bucks at your local wal-mart to multiple thousands of dollars at the specialty camera store.

I equate the difference between the low end and the high end tripod to wine. A 5 dollar box of wine will taste horrible, but you can drink it if there is nothing else around, a 20 dollar bottle of wine will taste one hundred times better than the 5 dollar bottle of wine and is totally worth the upgrade if you have the cash on you, and a thousand dollar bottle of wine is nice… but not 50 times nicer than the 20 dollar bottle of wine you just enjoyed. Not by a long shot.

Tripods are the same. a 20 dollar tripod is going to be a piece of junk, the panning and tilting will be sticky and show up in your shot and it will wobble with the slightest wind, worst of all it probably isn’t very balanced, so it might fall over at a moments notice. On the other hand, a 90 dollar tripod will be just fine, it will pan smooth, last you around a year of hard beating, be fairly balanced and is totally worth the higher price tag.

Like the $1000 bottle of wine, the $5000 tripod is for experts or aficionados with too much money on their hands. It will work perfectly, you will love it, but it isn’t worth spending 50 times as much. Particularly since we plan on taking it on canoe trips and tossing it down rapids. Imagine how much it would freak you out to get sand in the works of that tripod… or even a $500 one for that matter. The expensive tripods are great for studio work, as they will stay safe and get a lot of careful use, but for the outdoor guy, you need something that you can bash or lose and never look back at.

I like $90 tripods, every mom and pop camera store has them. Make sure before you buy that the head of the tripod has some sort of frictionless or liquid head so that you can pan and tilt smoothly. Test it to make sure it will support you camera, and blammo, you have a cheap ass tripod. Saving yourself about $500 off a standard video budget.

Lenses

Lenses are great. They can make a cool shot even cooler… and an outdoor shot spectacular. Lenses are one of the things that subtly seperates the amatuer from the professional.

Shooting water and sunny days there is a specific lens you cannot live without. It is called a polarizing filter. Unfortunately polarizers are not as cheap as other lens filters because they have moving parts. The other drawback is that they are not intuitive. You can’t just stick it on, point and shoot and expect it to do anything. You need to get a bit of practice.

A polarizing filter cuts out reflections. Technically, the concept is pretty simple. There are two lenses in a polarizer. Each lens has a series of light reflecting strands in them running across the lens. by spinning one of the lenses you change the direction the light is bouncing in to your camera. Doing so allows you to target light coming from a specific direction… such as the sun. This means that by simply spinning one of the two moving parts in the filter, you effectively can filter out the stuff that is causing the glare… such as the sun bouncing off the water.

This is hugely effective when you want to shoot the beautiful green waters of Killarny or have a great image of a car without being able to see yourself and the camera in it’s shiny paint.

The other major cool lens you can get, but CAN live without is a wide angle, or a fish eye lens. These lenses are usually pretty expensive, $100-$300, but are totally optional. The wide angle lens warps the image and is useful for shooting panoramic, because it allows your camera to see father to either side. The distortion is barely perceivable, but the camera can see more of the awesome mountain scape you are trying to capture. A fish eye lens on the other hand REALLY warps things, giving a cool artsy warp to your shot. This is an invaluable lens when you are shooting boats wizzing by your camera.

Extras

There are plenty of other cool tools out there, some useful, some are just something that looks cool to show off to other gear heads. My Girlfriend has a rule around our house; “If it doesn’t get used at least once a year it goes in the trash.”
Although often heartbreaking to throw away your coolest toy, it is a good way to keep the junk out of your camera bags, and keep you under budget.

No matter how cool a peice of gear seems, if you can’t think of more than one thing you will use it for, it just isn’t worth buying. In the case of teleprompters and steadycams, a little research can let you build your own for a fraction of the price. In the case of outdoor HD field monitors… you won’t ever really need it, so forgo the cost.

Remember that shooting outdoors also means you need to lug all your equipment with you, sometimes through swamps and snow. Keeping the weight down in your packs can really make a huge difference when you are hiking. The best way to keep the load down is to cut the extra gear.

That being said. Some gear you might want to get are things like:

* Waterproof Housing- Check out Ewa Marine. They have great underwater housing solutions for reasonable prices.
* P2 card reader- If you are using P2 cards in a Panasonc camera, you will NEED this
* Lens cleaner- make sure you buy a professional lens cleaning solution. Paper towels and cloths can scratch your lens and cost you big bucks to repair
* Waterproof camera bag- Check out Watershed bags for the best solutions. These are required for outdoor shooting
* Rain cover- although a plastic bag will do, sometimes a fitted cover works best

Thats a pretty basic list, but covers most of the gear we take with us on a regular shoot. I will add that a boom and steady cam are great assets if you have the space to take them with you, the money to buy them, or the time to build ‘em.

Any other suggestions you might have I would be happy to hear about.

Happy Shooting

The Animal

This week we are going to talk briefly about digital video editing software. Mainly dealing with the costs, and pro’s and con’s of a few of the systems out there.

Do I really need editing software? My computer came with something I think…

It sure did. If you own a PC, Microsoft included a thing called ‘Windows movie Maker’ with XP. If you can’t find it you can download it for free here
If you own a Macintosh computer running OSX, Apple included a program called ‘iMovie’ and ‘iDVD’ with the loaded software. If you deleted these from your applications you can restore them with the back up disk that shipped with your package.

If your needs are simple and you don’t plan on selling your masterpeice, then these programs will do what you need. However, I want to warn PC owners that ‘Windows Movie Maker’ is pretty buggy, and doesn’t really make a television quality DVD. Finally, against everything we are focused on here at the Video Animal’s Den.. it doesn’t currently support High Def. So if you own a PC (and you want High Def Video) you will need to go out and purchase another piece of software.

Mac Users are in luck. ‘iMovie’ is HD, and ‘iDVD’ will make your final DVD look nice. You will notice immediately however that there is a low ceiling on the things you can do. So this program is not recommended for professional use. If you are editing home movies, or even a low quality wedding video… this may be all you need. The best part is that iMovie is well integrated in to ‘Garage Band.’ so you even get a basic post production sound suite. All for free! Pretty sweet huh? Now you know why video people are big fans of Apple.

What editing software is best for amateur production?

Mac users may as well stick to ‘iMovie’ until they feel that they can’t do what they want and need more.  PC users will have to start looking around right away for an HD editing software bundle. The best one out there for windows users is ‘Adobe Premier Elements.’  Adobe is a good company (even though they outsource their customer service to India… make you pay for shipping if you have to send it back… and take up to 30 days to get you what you ask for) They have a tendency to rush their software which leads to buggy releases, that will crash often. (So save your projects regularly) On the upside, they let everyone try out complete versions all their software for free for 30 days, and you can skip all the shipping and buy the whole kit and kaboodle on line, here. This gives you a chance to try it on your system and make sure it is the right software for you. If you only have one DVD to make for your cousins birthday party, 30 days should be enough time to make that DVD and skip buying the software all together. (Adobe will hate me for saying that, I am sure… but their customer service wasted 4 days of my life, so I consider it a fair trade) The cost of the final program is around 100 bucks. Totally reasonable for what you are getting.

Using ‘Elements’ has an added benefit. Adobe literally uses ‘elements’ of their full production suite to make these smaller cheaper versions. Using this software will get you one step ahead when or if you decide to upgrade to a full version of Adobe Premier. You will already have a basic understanding of the user interface, and how to take your final edit to DVD.

For the Mac user that wants to take a step up from iMovie, and make a more polished film; You can try a free trial of ‘Adobe Premeir Elements’ and see if that works for you, or Apple offers a basic version of ‘Final Cut’, called ‘Final Cut Express 4′. Unfortunatly, you can’t do a free trial… They consider iMovie the ‘free trial’ and FCE4 is very much an improved version of iMovie.

This masterpiece needs a professional touch. What post-production software should I buy?

Great! Now we get to look at the fun stuff. There are a ton of options for the prosumer market. But I am going to look at two, Adobe Production Suite for PC users and a “Final Cut Studio 2′ for Mac users.

There are other production suites out there, and I beg you to do your research. You might find that one of the other suites out there works better for you. My father uses in ‘Vegas’ as his front line editing system, and there are a few ‘homebrewed’ ones as well. I have taken the time and boiled this list down to the two I consider the best, but there are a few others out there worth looking at.

Final Cut Studio 2

Apple did a really good job about 5 years ago. They bought out a really good software developer and made their software work great on their platform. This in turn meant that you had to buy a Mac to use this hefty chunk of software, and now Macs dominate editing suites everywhere. It is pretty rare that you see something other than a mac in a film or telivision studio now a days, and Final Cut is the reason why.

Final Cut is a great honking peice of software. it will run you about $1300, and with that you will get absolutely everything you need. At first this seems like a huge investment, but it is offset by the fact that shelling out big bucks now will let you upgrade for much cheaper as new versions come out. This is basically a one time investment, with minor chunks of cash every couple of years to upgrade to a better version of the software. Apple also does a great job of upgrading and fixing their software for free, and their customer support is absolutely the finest out there. For that reason alone I would chuck out your PC and get Final Cut.

Adobe Production Suite CS3

Adobe Production Suite is a comparable bundle of software for the PC user. (They make a Mac version too, but Final Cut is better for the same price, so get Final Cut)  If you don’t want to spend that much cash all at once, you can buy just ‘Adobe Premier’ ; which will let you edit and produce a full DVD or HD DVD. However, you won’t have all the sound or video effect software that Adobe is famous for (After Effects and Soundbooth). The full production bundle comes with a full version of ‘Flash’, ‘Illustrator’ and best of all ‘Photoshop’. This makes buying the full package a HUGE value. I ended up buying the production suite because I like to use ‘After Effects’ for titling and keying, and I need a copy of ‘Photoshop’ around for many other reasons. It was actually about the same price to get the whole package instead of buying these two programs by themselves.

Adobe’s customer service stinks. But they are trying to change that. Adobe also lets you try their complete software for free and see if you like it.. no one else is nice enough to do that. You can try out Adobe Premier here.

Pros and Cons

Final Cut has one major flaw. ‘Motion’. ‘Motion’ is the titling and effects software bundled with the package, and it does a decent job for basic titles. The big benefit is that if you are using ‘Motion’ to do titling and effects, you can make changes to the titles without having to output (this is a HUGE thing, we will talk about it more later). However, it is very limited and the quality is not always there. This is where adobe has the upper hand ‘After Effects7′ is the titling/effects software bundled with the production suite. It is an amazing chunk of software, does crystal clear effects, the best chomakey, and has a lot more titleing and motion effects. The downside is that every time you want to make a minor change in your title, you will need to output, import and reintegrate the footage in to your time line, which can be costly if you are on a tight time line.

The solution is expensive, and not really the thrust of this article. You fork out the bucks for both Final Cut and Adobe Production CS3. Between the two packages you will have every single damn thing a video editing junkie can think of, except for 3d letters… which you will have to fork out even more money for. All we can do at this point is hope that with each release,  ‘Motion’ keeps improving and that one day it will catch up with Adobe. (Yes… You can try After Effects out for free and compare… here)

Final Cut is also missing ‘Flash’ which comes in really handy for any web work you do. The reality is that the age of hard copy video is dying. Web broadcast and distribution is not just the future, it is now. Web is the only way to get true HD content out there without compatibilty issues or entering the HD DVD vs Blu-Ray debate. So having ‘Flash’ and other high end web compression apps is a huge bonus.

Final Cut wins on another side of the spectrum. The editing side. Final Cut is easy to use, doesn’t crash very often and works really fast. Premier is clunky, ugly, slow and crashes all the time. I like to think of Final Cut as a slick looking, well maintained luxury liner; fast, sleek lines, looks good, works well… Premier on the other hand is like an old tug boat; ugly as sin, slow, but gets the job done, and even if it sometimes stalls… it doesn’t sink. Since performance and ease of editing are really the most important parts of this debate, Final Cut really crushes Premier… so if you have a Mac… buy Final Cut.

In Future articles we will take a long look at the basics of video editing, and all the headaches that come with doing post production.  For now i hope this helps you with the last big purchase before you can begin making a movie. Next week we will take a look at the accessories you will need to get your outdoor production started.

Stay Tuned

The Animal

Original post by videoanimal and software by Elliott Back