I recently posted my videos from linux.conf.au earlier this year. I ended up spending a lot of time in post-production with these, probably more than I spent in preparing for the talk (and coming up with all the demos for the talk was a lot of work too!).
I ending up shelling out for Final Cut Express (FCE) as I really couldn’t find anything in the free/open source arena that could really do all the effects that I wanted. My biggest shock was how bloody difficult it was to actually use! Don’t let the express part fool you, the learning curve is far from quick. I was also a bit surprised how film oriented FCE is. It is much more geared towards production of video captured on tape that will be viewed on a real screen, than towards digitally captured video destined for the web. (Or at least that was my impression).
The other surprising bit of the process was that I really couldn’t find a suitable place to host my video on the web. Most of the free video places didn’t want hour long movies, and I found the quality of the video once it was transcoded to be pretty terrible in most cases. This is probably due to the fine detail that I’m attempting to show, which probably doesn’t get treated too nicely by most encoders. In any case, I ended up hosting the video using Amazon web services, since the storage a transfer fees were a lot more attractive than slicehost (where the rest of my website is hosted).
Any way, as with most of my posts, the main point of this one was to remind future Benno how to export decent quality movies with FCE. (There are about a million different options to play with, and it took a lot of tweaking to get right). So, in summary, you want something along the lines of:
Format: QuickTime Movie
Options
-Video
-Settings
Compression Type: H.264
Motion:
Frame Rate: Current
Key Frames: Automatic
Frame Reording: x
Data Rate:
Data Rate: Automatic
Compressor:
Quality: Best
Encoding: Best
-Filter: None
-Size:
640x480
Preserve: using letterbox
Deinterlace
-Sound
Linear PCM
Stereo L R
Rate: 48khz
Render Settings: Quality: Normal Linear PCM Seetings: Sample Size: 16 Litte Endian: x
-Prepare for stream --- nope
To get Ogg Theora output, using the XiphQT tools.
One of the best/worst things about doing your own post production is that you become very familiar with your own annoying habits and tics. If you watch the video, um, I’m sure you will, um, realise, um, what I, um, mean. (Note to self: rehearse my talks more!)
By the end of the editing process I was both sick of my own voice,
and sick of anyone who says computers are fast enough
,
when you spending a good 14 hours encoding and compressing a video,
you realise that for some things, computers are still damn slow. I would
expect most encoding and compression is reasonably easily paralellisable
(if that is a real word?), so this massively multi-core revolution will
hopefully help my future video editing projects.