What all do you have to do?Ok, so now you need to get your video footage into a format that you can edit. There are lots of choices that you can make in this process. Usually the choice is between getting something done faster and easier, or potentially having your final video look nicer. If you follow the easiest paths, this will be a cinch, and your video probably won't even look bad (though it could potentially look much better). It is really worth learning how to do all of the material contained here though. Once you learn everything and know how to do it, its possible to go through the entire process in a matter of minutes (not including time spent waiting on the computer to process things). Here is the entire procedure that we will follow:
It's likely that at this point you may not know if a certain
step will apply to you. The steps will be explained in more detail as
they appear in the guide. This list is here as a reference so you know
exactly what stage you are at when following these guide. You may want
to print them out and tick them off or cross them out one by one. I'm sure you have a lot of questions before we start so I'll
quickly clarify a couple of issues quickly
before we get going. What do I do if I have PAL footage? I will cover some of the issues of using a PAL source when we
analyse the footage we have. Although, it would definately be better if you could get ahold of NTSC footage ^_^ Why should I remove interlacing with Inverse Telecine? You don't have to at all - editing interlaced sources is something that video editing programs have been designed to do for years. However, having a progressive (non-interlaced) source can help quality when doing effects such as moving the image around, editing stills from the video and so on. It also aids the visual quality of a video created for Internet distribution as it is much harder to remove interlacing after you have edited a video. This is not a necessity, however, and all editing packages are designed with interlaced video editing in mind. Why do I have to make my video 24fps instead of keeping it at 23.976 if I Inverse Telecine NTSC footage? This is a problem with Adobe Premiere - if you don't use it
then you don't have to worry about it. Premiere cannot edit 23.976fps
footage in the same
precise way as it does 24fps footage. Even Premiere Pro does not
support if properly. If you are using a
different editing program such as Vegas that supports 23.976fps editing
then you can keep it like that - for premiere you HAVE to use 24fps if
you want reliable results. Why is it important for me to make a video 23.976 fps again when I've edited at 24fps? It helps making the footage standards compliant. With
23.976fps footage you can make progressive mpeg2 encodes and it's
really easy to convert something back to 29.97fps. It's not the end of
the world, however, as it doesn't affect Internet distribution and you
can still convert to 29.97fps, it's just not as perfect. Why do I have to convert the
audio before editing at 24fps in Premiere? Again, you don't have to.
It's just a trick to avoid having to have converted audio in your final
amv. If you edit at 24fps and want to
change back to 23.976fps at the end then you will have to change the
audio length at some point as it will stop being in sync when you
change the fps back. If you don't convert the audio before editing then
you will have to convert it later to sync up but if you DO convert the
audio beforehand then you can happily use the original audio file in
your final product. Having a converted version
that you edit with and
keeping the original version for your final product as described on this page is the option that gives the best
quality, but if you like you can just convert the audio at the end with
a slight loss of quality. The guides will show you how to do both of
these. Alright, now you've got a taste for some of the issues that surround preparing footage for amv creation with DVDs we can begin with step 1 which is the same whatever the video.... |