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

The first task in customizing your movie involves asking which aspect of the movie is most important. Is it:

• sound quality

• picture clarity

• picture smoothness.

Let's see how this affects a few different films. As we saw above, a sports movie would prioritize pic­ture smoothness first, then clarity, with sound lowest of all. A music video would probably want all three, but would have to settle for sound first, then clarity, unless there was significant movement in the movie. A film trailer may go for picture clarity (so you can read what it is and when it is released), then smoothness (for the action) and then sound.

Compression is available either in pre-set forms, whereby you simply choose from a selection on the edit program and in a few moments have performed the task, or you can use an additional piece of compression software to do it for you, which is slower but more exacting and more responsive to indi­vidual needs. If you choose the latter you need first to know something about the process to see how to get the most for your films. In practice, there are occasions when you will be able to send a movie straight to the web, with no complications and little work involved on your part, but it is more likely that you may need a separate method for each film you make, depending on content, style and where you want to send it. This gives you more control over quality and how people view the film.

Top ten tips for DIY encoding

1 Avoid recompression - do it only once, from the master copy each time.

2 For ease of use, compress using specialist software such as Cleaner.

3 If you know your film is primarily destined for the web or phone, shoot it with this in mind. Stand a couple of feet away from your camcorder LCD screen and see how the image you are filming looks. Notice how detail is lost and how close-ups are more necessary.

4 Compress just a single scene of your movie first before you commit to the settings you have chosen to save time.

5 Never capture video to your PC in compressed form. Always capture at uncom­pressed rates and then squash it down later.

6 Similarly, never compress a video before you edit. Don't store unedited footage in compressed form - on CD-ROM, for instance.

7 No codec gives very smooth video on the web, so don't be surprised by the results.

8 Always use specific settings for each film. Never reply on the general settings offered by a codec or compression program.

9 To test your compressed version always play back on a minimum target platform (a slow dial-up modem, for instance).