Carson Blog

I have edited many hours of video for fun and for school. I did one or two projects with windows Movie Maker, but ever since I got my Mac two years ago, life has been good and I use Final Cut Express for my primary compositing tool. Invariably, however, I use a lot of tools besides final cut to get the job done.

Here’s a typical situation: We want to make a music video. We’d like to have some shots where we are on the moon or in some exotic place – hence, we need a green screen. On the background we want some videos which happen to reside on YouTube. So the tasks will involve:

- Taking our video and laying it out in the desired order
- Importing movies from disparate sources in a variety of formats (flv, mp4, mov, avi)
- Add titles
- Get some music from iTunes
- Export our movie to YouTube

Here’s the tools used:

- Compositing is done entirely in Final Cut express. It has a chroma keyer that does very good green screening.
- I use either ffmpegX (ffmpeg for OS X) or FLVs Streaming Export Wizard to take a file from youtube and turn it into an mp4. 50% of the time ffmpeg doesnt work, and flv does, but one of them always comes to the rescue when the other fails.
- After most of the content layout, i can go to LiveType and do titling.
- Got iTunes music thats DRM protected? Owners of macs have it easy. Just import the music into iMovie HD, put a single photo in it, and export full quality. you can then ffmpeg that to strip out just the mp3, or just pop it directly into Final Cut Express. No wasted CDs!
- I find the following pipelines to be fairly descent for youtube export: 1) Export DV using quicktime conversion in final cut express. 2) Transcode the DV to FLV using ffmpeg. I should say, this is to render to flash video, not necessarily YouTube. I use this flash video along with SWFObject to host videos on my own server. This lets me choose whatever video size and quality i want.

When things get sticky, I also pull out the following tools:
– Audacity
– OpenCV (just program it yourself!)
– Gimp (you can do per-frame editing, and I have done so)

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I recorded this video during the 2006 Nasville Nights performance at BYU-Idaho. Ok, so I missed the first 15 seconds of the song – sorry.

This song was originally written by Martina McBride and is called concrete angel. Besides being rather sad (given its message about child abuse), this gal performed it well. I gotta say, too, whoever she is, she is a babe.

This seems like a good way to describe a mashup involving Google Maps, Simile Timeline, and JW SWF Player.  Its also a great way, in my opinion, to view a slideshow, for a number of reasons.  First, because it gives viewers a more interactive medium – the timeline and video can be used to jump to any point in the slideshow.  Where there is a lot of traveling, this gives viewers a sense of how much distance was traveled and in how short a period.   Second, because it just looks more interesting – its plain cool!

To see my proof of concept implementation, go here.

I just bought an Acomdata PureDrive USB 2.0+esata.   Since the drive was so cheap, and since it supported eSata, I decided to get a esata card for my heretofore unused expresscard port on my macbook pro.  The combo works wonderfully!  I get over 400 mbits sustained reading and writing.  Not bad!

There is one trick.  The drive comes formatted with an MSDOS partition.  When I tried to format it to OS X extended, I got this error “File system formatter failed.”  Looking on the internet, I found this post which described a “multiple partition” method.  In truth, the only needed action is as follows:

1. Go to Disk Utility
2. Click on the external drive
3. Click on Partition
4. Pick “1″ under “volume scheme”
5. Select “Options”
6. The selected partition scheme is likely “Master Boot Record.”  You want GUID.  Select this and click “Apply”
7. When the previous step finishes, go to “Erase” and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click erase.