PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

company, unveiled its non-linear editing system it was the biggest shake-up in editing since Melies played around with time and sequence in the early 1900s.

We called it 'non-linear' editing in the professional arena and desktop editing for the consumer. Working on a computer, clips could be endlessly switched about and played until the perfect sequence was found. You could work on various bits of the movie all at once, building it up in a more organic fashion. Actually, it has more in common with the old scissors and glue method of celluloid, since you used to go back and add bits of film and work on any part whenever you wanted. Certainly, the kinds of visual devices common to us today, such as montage or flashback, are a result of being able to access any part of a film.

1994 saw the next big step, with the patent of Apple's FireWire cable - patented as IEEE 1394, or the Institute of Electrical Engineers' 13th patent in 1994. The big problem with video is its sheer size and here was a cable which didn't baulk at the huge amounts of data it had to conduct. Transferring at a huge 400kb/s it avoids drop-outs of frames when you transfer footage from camera to computer. To use the analogy of traffic on a road, FireWire is like a freeway/motorway, while other cables like USB 1.0 are like quiet back roads; send too much traffic and it gets clogged up. The need for FireWire arose because new digital cameras were hitting the market which could send data direct to a computer, whereas analog cameras had to first translate their analog data into digital code. Like translating a document from English to another language, this process added time and expense.

With manufacturers putting cameras into the market which recorded in digital, FireWire made it pos­sible to make the most of them on the home PC. The biggest problem next became what to do with the movies once you had edited them. The available storage disks were insufficient - floppy disks - and the modems of early Internet users were not nearly capable of downloading video files.

Which brings us to the development of clever ways to squash down video into manageable files. Once again, Apple stepped in with QuickTime technology in the early 1990s, again placing it firmly in the consumer market rather than expecting it to have purely professional uses. A group of international experts called MPEG had been working for some time to standardize