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| Get our free newsletter for the latest releases Contents Music Software Quick Reference Resources Online Ordering Software Authors Company Info | Shareware Music Machine News Producing a Real Video - one artist's perspective Date posted: April 19 1999 Producing a Real Video by Kim Swift I have a Real Video for my song "Carousel" that was just added to the Soundscapes Stage of The Incredibly Small Concert Hall at: http://www.smallhall.com/stage14.htmlThis is the first song at The Incredibly Small Concert Hall to have visuals. I want to share my experience with you on how I made this video in case you're interested. Maybe some of the lessons I learned could help you if you decide to make a Real Video. I borrowed a friend's Hi8 video camera. His was a Sony Handycam that sure lived up to its name. It was small, portable, and easy to use. I had never heard of "Hi8" before. Hi8 is a little bit better than Super VHS. If you do a video, record with a camera that is Super VHS or better in quality. Digital video cameras are the best. Video cameras are available for rental from video shops. I had two goals in mind when I filmed the video. One was to make a family video and the other was to make the "Carousel" music video. I shot about an hour and a half of footage. I filmed at the North Pole (Santa's Workshop) Amusement Park in Cascade, Colorado. I searched the yellow pages for a video editing shop. I found one that advertised, "We make quality video affordable." The quite reasonable. High-end video shops can get prohibitively expensive if you get into the league that produces videos for commercial networks, for example. I watched the Hi8 family video and built a script of the scenes I wanted to include in the music video. The video shop digitized the Hi8 tape using a Casablanca video editing system. Once the entire footage was on the hard drive, we found the scenes I wanted to include and put them into the "storyboard". The first iteration was just getting one to two minute scenes into the storyboard; the second iteration was fine tuning the selections down to the 10, 15 or 30 second sections that would go into the music video. Then we used the video editing system to put in some "soft cuts" in certain scenes and to add credits and the title. Once we finished producing the music video, I requested saving it in some format that I could use later so the video shop saved it to a "Digital Video" (DV) tape. In order to produce a Real Video file, I had to get a .avi (audio visual interleave) file. RealProducer also accepts .mov files for input; check the documentation of RealProducer for video input formats. The Recording Tips section of the RealProducer G2 help file specifies that the .avi should be:
You should check this section of the RealProducer G2 help file to make sure you have the latest information. A different video shop took the Digital Video tape and re-captured it into another PC to produce the .avi file. The .avi file I used as input for RealProducer has 20 frames per second. The more frames per second, the better; 15 frames per second is "multimedia", 30 frames per second is "broadcast" quality. The .avi file has a 44.1 khz sampling rate for the audio which is CD quality sound. 20 frames per second was the best that the re-capturing hardware at the second video shop could do without "dropping frames" and it was better than a previous .avi file which had 15 frames per second. I feel that a .avi file with 20 frames per second was sufficient to produce my video but a .avi file with 15 frames per second was not. My "Carousel" video is about four minutes long and the uncompressed .avi file I used for input to RealProducer is about 355 megabytes. To achieve an acceptable image quality in the Real Video for a 28.8 kbps modem connection, I had to use the "slide show" option of RealProducer instead of one of the "video" options. For a 28.8 modem, I don't think that even a 30 frames per second .avi file would have made it possible to produce a true "video" of acceptable quality. But it's still really nice to see the pictures with the music. Maybe I'll learn some "tricks of the trade" to help me produce a true "video" for a 28.8 modem but at this point I find it completely undoable. The 28.8 Real Video file is about 400 k in size. I have produced a Real Video for a 56 kbps modem connection which is a "slide show" with about double the number of still pictures and is about 1 Megabyte in size. I have produced a Real Video for a "corporate LAN" (T1) connection which is a true video instead of a slide show and is about 4 Megabytes in size. The T1 file is a rather acceptable reproduction of the original .avi file and has 8.4 frames per second. The higher the quality of the .avi file you use for input, the better the streaming video file you get from RealProducer. The second video shop put the .avi file on a CD ROM which I then took to a different PC to run RealProducer on. It would be better to run RealProducer on the same computer that produces the .avi file so that you are not limited to the 600 Megabytes size limitation of a CD ROM. The total cost of my project was about $300 including about $100 for 12 VHS dubs of the entire footage for family members. This cost would have been more if I would have rented a video camera instead of borrowing one from a friend. The web is very graphics intensive and I think video adds a lot to the presentation of a song. Video makes a web page "come alive". For me the video project was a lot of fun and I've gotten some very positive feedback on it. Kim Swift http://www.sni.net/poppinwheelies/mount02.htm Shareware Music Machine would like to thank both Indie-Music.com and Kim Swift for permission to use this article.
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