Video editing SE 520 - Visual Anthropology

Steve Lyon. email: sml2
Ext 3948 Rm L26
I have no fixed time to help anyone but you can arrange appointements for 30 minute tutorials by giving me a call, dropping by my office or emailing me.

Equipment: DV camera with firewire cable. DV iMacs. 36Gb firewire disk drive. Microphone. Head/ear phones.

Three phases:

• downloading
• editing video and sound
• transferring to VHS or CD-ROM
  
  

1) Downloading
For DV cameras: use iMovie software on the DV iMacs (the ones without removable CD trays). Through the firewire cable you can control the DV camera with the iMovie software. Nothing to remember here-- let the software do its job with the default settings.

The software will automatically break the video into clips at the change of scene or when your file size reaches 2GB. You can create your own clips later.

IMPORTANT: download onto the firewire drive. NOT onto the iMac HD.
Each team has 17 GB allocated to them. This space should be more than enough. If you use the iMac HD for some reason be sure to empty it before you finish.



2) Editing video and sound
Remember to use the iMovie help manual. Most questions can be answered using the help manual.

Arranging clips. Selecting clips. Cutting clips.
Transitions. Titles.
Sounds-- effects. recording your own sounds. narration.
Music-- recording from CDís.
Changing volume of different sound clips

3) Transferring to VHS or CD-ROM
Using iMovie export the completed movie to the appropriate format (in general-- Photo Jpeg, 24 fps, Qualcomm voice/music, 44 Mh, stereo). This takes time. Unfortunately you must stay with the machines while this is going on because the firewire drives cannot be secured. DONíT put this off till the last minute.

For VHS: After the movie has been exported to the appropriate format then it needs to be transferred to Davidís machine where it gets converted yet again to a format that can be downloaded to VHS.

For CD-ROM: There are several ways to format for CD-ROM so anyone wanting to do this needs to figure out what they want to do and then ask me for specific help. Look at other CDís. Among other things a CD can be made using the same format as a website and that way you can have both a website and cd which complement each other (and for those who have made their own websites it will be easy).


Like anything to do with computers this takes longer than you think it will. Donít put any of it off till the last minute and donít count on the machines being free every time you want to use them. You must share the firewire drives and two teams canít use the same one at the same time. There are 4 DV iMacs so if you all need to work at the same time you can copy some of the media onto the iMac drive while you work and then copy it back onto the firewire drive when youíre finished but DO NOT leave this on the iMac HD. This is dangerous for you and inconsiderate for others (this video takes A LOT of disk space!).

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