The Lone Ranger
05-30-2010, 01:40 AM
About a year and a half ago, when the local Circuit City was going out of business, I picked up a high-definition digital video camera for a really nice price. Since then, I've managed to shoot many hours of waterfalls, wildflowers, mountains, and so forth.
Now, what to do with that footage? It takes up a lot space on the hard drive, for one thing. So, I figured I could edit the footage and make dvds. I have iMovie and iDVD on my computer, so how hard could it be?
The guy at the Apple Store talked me into buying a program called Final Cut Express. According to Apple, this program is used by Hollywood professionals to edit and assemble movies, and is very, very powerful. It may be powerful, but as I soon found out, it's not at all user-friendly. At all.
But fortunately, iMovie is. I quickly found that it's remarkably easy to edit both the audio and video portions of my material with iMovie and assemble them into a movie. Then you can add neat transitions, labels, etc. Being the sort of person that I am, I've naturally put on-screen labels indicating date, location, and the exact species of plant or animal being featured.
It was lots of fun and relatively easy, though time-consuming. The hardest part, as it turns out, is managing the sound. You can separate the audio and video tracks of your movies with iMovie, but iMovie has very limited options for doing anything other than editing, copying, and moving around audio clips.
Final Cut has much more sophisticated sound-editing techniques available, but it's a real pain in the nether regions.
One thing that has been frustrating is learning how amazingly-difficult it is to get "clean" sound. Even in remote natural areas, it's amazingly difficult to get more than a few seconds at a time of recorded sound that is free of artificial noises -- aircraft flying overhead, a truck on the road a mile or so away, people talking, etc.
Sometimes, I'll deliberately run the recorder for a couple of minutes for no other reason than that I'm attempting to get at least a few seconds of "clean" sound. Since iMovie lets you copy and past sound clips, if you can get just a couple of seconds' worth of clean sound (birds singing, water flowing, wind in the trees, etc.), you can just copy those few seconds' worth of clean sound, string the copies together, maybe overlay a couple of layers -- and voila, you can assemble a "perfect" soundtrack consisting of the sound of wind in the trees, birdsong, and rushing water -- with no annoying aircraft or automobile sounds, no sounds of people talking, no sounds of footsteps, etc. Lovely!
I don't really consider it "cheating" to alter the soundscape that way, since I'm not actually putting stuff in that wasn't actually there; I'm just getting rid of the sounds that I don't want.
Anyway, the recordable dvd is supposed to hold an hour of HD video. So, using iMovie and iDVD, I edited, clipped, rearranged, labeled -- and voila, I had an hour's worth of video ready to be transferred to dvd. So I let the computer render and then write it overnight.
The results were disappointing. I had specifically asked if iMovie and iDVD (and Final Cut) would let me record high-definition video on dvds, and the people at the Apple Store had insisted that I was good to go: just assemble my project and burn it onto dvd.
Well, what they hadn't told me -- and what Apple doesn't tell you, either -- is that iDVD automatically converts HD video into standard-definition video when rendering it for dvd. So the dvd I got didn't look anywhere near as I'd hoped.
I tried talking to people at the Apple Store, but got they were no help. Nor was any of the documentation for iMovie or iDVD of any help. Finally, I found an online article which explained that -- though many manufacturers tell you that dvds will accept high-definition video images just fine -- you can't play high-definition video on a dvd player. And though the Apple people had insisted that my Superdrive would record high-definition video just fine -- it won't.
The reason why you can't record high-definition video with a standard dvd burner, and why you can't watch a high-definition dvd on a standard dvd player -- it quite obvious in hindsight. I wish I'd learned about it sooner, though. It's not that a dvd doesn't have the storage capacity for high-definition video; it's that the red laser of a standard dvd burner (and a standard dvd player) cannot encode enough information for high-definition video. That is, a red laser cannot encode information with enough density to allow your television set to display high-definition video. There simply isn't enough "bandwidth" available.
If you want to record and watch high-definition video on a dvd or blu-ray disk, you must use a shorter-wavelength, blue laser to record and then read the disk.
It isn't a question of how much information the dvd can hold; it's a question of how much information can be supplied to the television per second. Since most televisions work by "drawing" either 60 or 120 pictures per second, the amount of detail that can be in those pictures is limited by how much information the laser can encode per second.
It's perfectly obvious in hindsight, but it would have been really nice if I'd known this sooner. I guess I shouldn't have been so naive in trusting that the Apple Store employees knew what they were talking about. If I'd given the matter enough thought and/or done enough research, I'd have known better.
So, I decided to go all-in. I bought a blu-ray recorder. And I bought a program called Toast, which allows you to record high-definition video. I also decided to get a bit more serious about the sound issues. The thing is, even if you get perfectly "clean" sound, there's still an annoying hum on the soundtract that's produced by the camera itself. How to deal with that?
With some trial-and-error, I figured out how to make it work.
Okay, so you download the video onto your computer. Next, open the individual clips with Final Cut. Why Final Cut? Because, unlike iMovie, it allows you to isolate the audio and video tracks and save them as separate files. Open the saved sound files with a nifty sound-editing program called Audacity. Audacity is remarkably easy to use and it allows you to clean up the sound in your audio files to a remarkable extend. It does a great job of getting rid of that annoying hum, random pops and clicks, etc. Now save the cleaned-up audio files.
Now you can use iMovie to re-mate the audio and video files. You can edit them, rearrange them as you like, add text and transitions, and finally render them into finished, high-definition movies.
Last, but not least, I used toast and the brand-new blu-ray recorder to make my first, high-definition movie, recorded onto a blu-ray disk.
The results are amazing! It looks far better than I had dared hope! The images are sharp and crystal-clear, and the sound is nearly perfect. It looks almost like something that might have been done professionally.
So, while it was a lot of work and involved quite a bit of trial and error, and while the initial results were disappointing, the final results have proved to be well worth all of the effort.
The disk is of footage I shot in Shenandoah National Park, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway. And it's easily far better in quality than the professionally-shot dvds that you can find for sale at the gift shops in those parks. (I can't take credit for that; it's due to having a high-definition camera and good editing/recording programs.) So, I'm pleased with the results.
Cheers,
Michael
Now, what to do with that footage? It takes up a lot space on the hard drive, for one thing. So, I figured I could edit the footage and make dvds. I have iMovie and iDVD on my computer, so how hard could it be?
The guy at the Apple Store talked me into buying a program called Final Cut Express. According to Apple, this program is used by Hollywood professionals to edit and assemble movies, and is very, very powerful. It may be powerful, but as I soon found out, it's not at all user-friendly. At all.
But fortunately, iMovie is. I quickly found that it's remarkably easy to edit both the audio and video portions of my material with iMovie and assemble them into a movie. Then you can add neat transitions, labels, etc. Being the sort of person that I am, I've naturally put on-screen labels indicating date, location, and the exact species of plant or animal being featured.
It was lots of fun and relatively easy, though time-consuming. The hardest part, as it turns out, is managing the sound. You can separate the audio and video tracks of your movies with iMovie, but iMovie has very limited options for doing anything other than editing, copying, and moving around audio clips.
Final Cut has much more sophisticated sound-editing techniques available, but it's a real pain in the nether regions.
One thing that has been frustrating is learning how amazingly-difficult it is to get "clean" sound. Even in remote natural areas, it's amazingly difficult to get more than a few seconds at a time of recorded sound that is free of artificial noises -- aircraft flying overhead, a truck on the road a mile or so away, people talking, etc.
Sometimes, I'll deliberately run the recorder for a couple of minutes for no other reason than that I'm attempting to get at least a few seconds of "clean" sound. Since iMovie lets you copy and past sound clips, if you can get just a couple of seconds' worth of clean sound (birds singing, water flowing, wind in the trees, etc.), you can just copy those few seconds' worth of clean sound, string the copies together, maybe overlay a couple of layers -- and voila, you can assemble a "perfect" soundtrack consisting of the sound of wind in the trees, birdsong, and rushing water -- with no annoying aircraft or automobile sounds, no sounds of people talking, no sounds of footsteps, etc. Lovely!
I don't really consider it "cheating" to alter the soundscape that way, since I'm not actually putting stuff in that wasn't actually there; I'm just getting rid of the sounds that I don't want.
Anyway, the recordable dvd is supposed to hold an hour of HD video. So, using iMovie and iDVD, I edited, clipped, rearranged, labeled -- and voila, I had an hour's worth of video ready to be transferred to dvd. So I let the computer render and then write it overnight.
The results were disappointing. I had specifically asked if iMovie and iDVD (and Final Cut) would let me record high-definition video on dvds, and the people at the Apple Store had insisted that I was good to go: just assemble my project and burn it onto dvd.
Well, what they hadn't told me -- and what Apple doesn't tell you, either -- is that iDVD automatically converts HD video into standard-definition video when rendering it for dvd. So the dvd I got didn't look anywhere near as I'd hoped.
I tried talking to people at the Apple Store, but got they were no help. Nor was any of the documentation for iMovie or iDVD of any help. Finally, I found an online article which explained that -- though many manufacturers tell you that dvds will accept high-definition video images just fine -- you can't play high-definition video on a dvd player. And though the Apple people had insisted that my Superdrive would record high-definition video just fine -- it won't.
The reason why you can't record high-definition video with a standard dvd burner, and why you can't watch a high-definition dvd on a standard dvd player -- it quite obvious in hindsight. I wish I'd learned about it sooner, though. It's not that a dvd doesn't have the storage capacity for high-definition video; it's that the red laser of a standard dvd burner (and a standard dvd player) cannot encode enough information for high-definition video. That is, a red laser cannot encode information with enough density to allow your television set to display high-definition video. There simply isn't enough "bandwidth" available.
If you want to record and watch high-definition video on a dvd or blu-ray disk, you must use a shorter-wavelength, blue laser to record and then read the disk.
It isn't a question of how much information the dvd can hold; it's a question of how much information can be supplied to the television per second. Since most televisions work by "drawing" either 60 or 120 pictures per second, the amount of detail that can be in those pictures is limited by how much information the laser can encode per second.
It's perfectly obvious in hindsight, but it would have been really nice if I'd known this sooner. I guess I shouldn't have been so naive in trusting that the Apple Store employees knew what they were talking about. If I'd given the matter enough thought and/or done enough research, I'd have known better.
So, I decided to go all-in. I bought a blu-ray recorder. And I bought a program called Toast, which allows you to record high-definition video. I also decided to get a bit more serious about the sound issues. The thing is, even if you get perfectly "clean" sound, there's still an annoying hum on the soundtract that's produced by the camera itself. How to deal with that?
With some trial-and-error, I figured out how to make it work.
Okay, so you download the video onto your computer. Next, open the individual clips with Final Cut. Why Final Cut? Because, unlike iMovie, it allows you to isolate the audio and video tracks and save them as separate files. Open the saved sound files with a nifty sound-editing program called Audacity. Audacity is remarkably easy to use and it allows you to clean up the sound in your audio files to a remarkable extend. It does a great job of getting rid of that annoying hum, random pops and clicks, etc. Now save the cleaned-up audio files.
Now you can use iMovie to re-mate the audio and video files. You can edit them, rearrange them as you like, add text and transitions, and finally render them into finished, high-definition movies.
Last, but not least, I used toast and the brand-new blu-ray recorder to make my first, high-definition movie, recorded onto a blu-ray disk.
The results are amazing! It looks far better than I had dared hope! The images are sharp and crystal-clear, and the sound is nearly perfect. It looks almost like something that might have been done professionally.
So, while it was a lot of work and involved quite a bit of trial and error, and while the initial results were disappointing, the final results have proved to be well worth all of the effort.
The disk is of footage I shot in Shenandoah National Park, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway. And it's easily far better in quality than the professionally-shot dvds that you can find for sale at the gift shops in those parks. (I can't take credit for that; it's due to having a high-definition camera and good editing/recording programs.) So, I'm pleased with the results.
Cheers,
Michael