Beyond Pictures Blog

Photoshop Template for Epson R260 Printing to CD

2008-10-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

Printer manufactures bug me. Their razor-and-blade method of marketing with the capacity of ink cartridges getting smaller and smaller and the cost getting higher and higher is really annoying. Fortunately, I found a great Continuous Ink System for my Epson. More on that later.

I have an Epson R260 printer. It's a great printer. I rarely use it to print directly on CDs because I prefer to use glossy labels which give me a much better look. But I had a project where the label was all text and it became practical (and cost-effective) to print on the disc directly. I'd long since thrown the driver disk away - I always just download the latest drivers from the Internet. Unfortunately, the Epson PrintCD software was on that disk, and you can't download it ANYwhere (at the time of writing - I looked all over and couldn't find it, except here - where the web page author will email you instructions on how to download it apparently - I put in a request and haven't heard back yet...we'll see). [UPDATE: The author did contact with me with a link to download the software but I don't really need it now that I have a Photoshop template. But if you want it, I won't steal his thunder. Go to the page linked above and make a request under feedback.] It is really annoying that Epson does not provide this as a download. What about updates??? Apparently for $9.95 they'll send you another CD. Thanks a lot, Epson. Anyway, I don't need their lame software other than to align where in the world I am supposed to print so that it lines up on the CD properly. I normally just design in Photoshop, save to JPG, and use their software to print. I got tired of looking for the software and figured it wouldn't take me that long to just design a Photoshop template with guides to print the label in the right place.

It didn't take too long. The Epson driver software sets the paper size to A4 when you select CD/DVD as the source, so I created an A4 blank Photoshop page (300 dpi) and put a black circle on it (taken from another template I already had so I knew the size was right). After a few print-move iterations, I got it right.

So basically, in Epson's driver software (printing preferences) set the Source to CD/DVD, the Type to CD/DVD, and the Size (which will automatically change) to A4 (210 x 297 mm). Then use this template to line up your artwork.

In my experience, it seemed to print a little lighter than normal when printing to the CD (a matte surface on my CDs). Normally when I print from Photoshop I go into the "advanced" area of the Epson driver, select ICM, and leave the "Off (no color adjustment)" box unchecked. Using ICM seems to normally give me better color matching. In this case, I set it to ICM and CHECKED the "Off (no color adjustment)" box and this seemed to give me very accurate results. Of course, I was only printing colored text and a simple small football image, so I didn't exactly have a really colorful sample to go off, but that seemed to work best.

epsonR260-CDTemplate.psd

Script to reverse order of open documents in Photoshop

2008-08-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

I am constantly scanning batches of documents into Photoshop and needed a way to reverse the order of the open documents. For example, I'm scanning 50 documents of a child growing up from age 0 to 20. I start with the baby picture and end with the picture of them at 20. When I'm done scanning I then want to save them in order, starting with 001.jpg as the youngest picture and 050.jpg as the oldest picture. Problem is, when I'm done scanning the active document is the oldest picture, and I often don't know exactly how many documents I've scanned, so I can't just start with 050.jpg and start counting down. If only I could reverse the order of the open documents - then I could start with 001.jpg and just end with whatever number of documents I scanned.

I used to do this by automating a save action and just saving all the documents and then reopening them. This worked OK because the documents were all Untitled-4, Untitled-5, etc, and I could open them in alphabetical order. But I thought that surely there must be a better way. I finally broke down and wrote a very simple vbscript to accomplish this task.

Here it is:
**************
'declare variables:
dim app
dim doc
dim arrDocs
dim strDocs

'set object reference to photoshop:
set app=createObject("Photoshop.Application")

'create a comma delimited string of all open photoshop documents:
for each doc in app.documents
strDocs=strDocs & doc.name & ","
next

'take off the last comma:
strDocs=left(strDocs,len(strDocs)-1)

'split the string into an array:
arrDocs=split(strDocs,",")

'iterate through the array in reverse order, making each document the active document as you go:
i=ubound(arrDocs)
do while i=>0
app.ActiveDocument=app.documents(arrDocs(i))
i=i-1
loop

'cleanup:
set app=nothing
*************************

Copy and paste the area between the asterisks into notepad, save it as reverseOrder.vbs, and double click it. Voila (assuming you have Photoshop open with all your documents open).

Your reason for wanting to reverse the order of open documents in Photoshop could be different, but at least this is a way to do it. I searched the web and couldn't find a way, so there you go. If there is a simple way, and I'm a moron for resorting to a script to accomplish something easily done another way, please let me know!

For more information on Photoshop scripting, refer to the Photoshop CS3 scripting guide, downloadable from Adobe, and maybe on your computer if you installed the content CD with the Master Collection (in my case, this is found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Master Collection Content CD\Documentation\Scripting\Adobe Photoshop CS3)

From YouTube to Powerpoint

2008-05-09T08:02:00.001-07:00

I get asked this question quite often: How can I take a video from YouTube (or some other video site) and put it in PowerPoint? Unfortunately, it's definitely not a drag and drop operation. These instructions are kind of long, but really not that difficult, and once you do it it's easy to figure it out. There are two basic ways to do it.
1 - Download the flv, get a flv player, associate flv files with the flv player, and link to the file in PowerPoint
2 - Download the flv, convert it to a wmv file, and insert it as a movie file in PowerPoint.

The latter is definitely preferable. So here are the instructions for both ways:
1 - Find the video on YouTube. Once you've located it, clear your browser cache. This isn't totally necessary, but makes the video easier to find. In Internet Explorer this is done via Tools -> Options -> Delete. If you're using IE and haven't done this for awhile (or ever) prepare to wait awhile while it clears the cache. I figure if you are using Firefox then you know how to do this.
2 - Load the video, or if you are already on the page with the video, refresh the page. Wait for the video to finish downloading - you don't need to play it all the way through (you can even pause it if you want) but let the red bar indicating how much it has downloaded progress all the way to the end.
3 - Once downloaded, go back to Tools -> Options and access your cache. If you are using Firefox, browse to your cache in windows explorer. In XP, this will be c:\Documents and Settings\[yourusername]\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[nameofyourprofile]\Cache. Make sure you are viewing protected operating system files or you won't see the necessary folders (in windows explorer: Tools -> Folder Options -> View -> UNcheck "Hide Protected Operating System Files"). The nameofyourprofile mentioned is probably the only folder listed, and probably ends in "default." Whether using IE or Firefox, sort the cache by size. The largest file is probably the video file you want, and for YouTube videos will likely start with "getVideo." Copy it to your computer somewhere, like your desktop, and rename it to MyVideo.flv (or whatever, as long as it ends in flv). You can also use Real Player to download the video easier than pulling it from your cache, but personally I hate Real Player, so I'm not going to encourage you to use it. There are also several web services out there that will create the flv for you to download if you give it the video ID, but why bother? It's easy enough to just get it from your cache.
4 - If you plan to convert it to a WMV to play inside PowerPoint, then go to step 5 - otherwise do step 4 and then you are done. If you are just going to link to the file in PowerPoint, then create a hyperlink in PowerPoint that points to the FLV file. You will need a FLV player installed on the computer that will be showing the PowerPoint. There are lots of them out there - Wimpy Flash Player is a good one - just a simple standalone exe (nothing to install). You do need to tell windows to use this program to open .flv files though - the easiest way to do this is just to double click the flv file, and when prompted, point Windows to "Wimpy FLV Player.exe" (wherever you put it) and make sure the box "Always use this program to open this kind of file" is checked.
5 - Again, there are lots of programs you could use to convert FLV to WMV. I recommend VLC Player from VideoLan. It's free (open source), and plays just about any kind of video or audio file, and can be used to convert from one type to the other. Download it and install it using the above link.
6 - Someone has already written instructions on how to use VLC to convert FLV to WMV, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, but let me know if the above link no longer works.
7 - Once converted to WMV, insert the file into PowerPoint as a movie file.

Please note that there are often copyright ramifications. Just because something is on YouTube doesn't mean that the person who put it there didn't violate copyright by putting it there in the first place.

Scripting JPGs to WMV to create Time Lapse videos

2008-04-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

At my primary job I am responsible for 5 construction cameras that monitor a major downtown redevelopment project. These cameras provide video as well as take period snapshots, both of which can be accessed remotely via a web interface. The cameras are 4 Axis 232D+, and one Axis 233D. There's a ton I could write about this whole project, but I mainly wanted to document my current procedure for taking the JPG images and converting them to video files to be used in powerpoint, put on DVD, etc. I'm writing this for my own benefit and documentation, so things may be sketchy, feel free to ask me if you have any questions. This is a work in process...

These are PTZ cameras, and they are each programmed with 3-6 preset positions at which they take a still image, every half an hour from 8am to 6pm. That means that every half an hour I get still shots of about 20 different views. All of these views can be used to create time lapse videos. The powers that be would like a time lapse video of every sequence (or view) once per quarter. I use Adobe Premiere all the time, but it would be insane to try to accomplish this with that product - enter open source.

Ok, here is the basic workflow:

Use windows find to get just the images I want. I'm using vista, so I can use advanced query syntax. The cameras take images every half an hour - for longer spanning time lapses I typically just want one picture per day. Because I want a certain time each day, I can't use date/time criteria for search, so I use the file name, which are all datetime stamped. Syntax for one per day:
name:*16-0?-??-??.jpg

syntax for range:
name:*12-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*13-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*14-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*15-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*16-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*17-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*18-0?-??-??.jpg OR name:*19-0?-??-??.jpg OR

The latter would give me all images at 12pm, 1,2,3,4,5,6,and 7pm. By the way, I use a vbs script to sort all the images the camera takes into folders for each camera, sequence, year, and quarter. Maybe I'll write about that part of it later.

Once I've found the images I want, I process them with a utility called MakeAVI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/makeavi/). Two things I'd like to see in this program: drag and drop and command line scripting. I found some paid versions out there that do this, but I like free, and for the most part this program does the simple job it's programmed to do (a user on sourceforge actually took the source code and made it scriptable through a CLI, but neither the source or the binary for that is posted - I emailed to see if it was available). Because I can't drag from my search window into MakeAVI, I copy the files to an empty folder and then add the files from there. When using MakeAVI, I use the DivX encoder to compress the AVI files. Uncompressed takes longer and the file size is unnecessarily huge. I don't want to lose much quality, so my DivX settings are: Certification Profile: Home Theater Profile; Use presets to configure the encoder: checked; Rate control mode: 1 pass quality based; Target quantizer: 1; no other changes.

Convert the DivX avi to a WMV file. Personally, I'd be happy with DivX, but these will be used in PowerPoint, so WMV is your best bet for compatability there. For this I use a slick little program called SUPER. It's basically a gui to a ton of different codecs and open source utilities. You can batch process, so I typically create all of my avi's first, then batch process them all to WMV. My settings in SUPER are: Output Container: WMV; Output Video Codec: WMV8; audio is disabled; Video Scale size: no change; aspect: no selection; Frame/Sec: 25; Bitrate: 4032 (quite high, I know, but I've found it needs to be at least this high to avoid blocky compression artifacts);Options: High Quality. SUPER is scriptable, so I may create a script to automatically process all my AVIs for me, but it's pretty easy to just add them manually and batch process them.

Other notes:
Because the files are all on a server on my network, it would be a pain to copy all the files locally that I needed. So I use offline files in Vista. Vista handles caching all the files locally, then when I want to process them I tell Vista to work offline. The when processing the images it uses the local copies.

I'm working on a script to automatically copy the appropriate images I need into various folders, all ready to be processed with MakeAVI, rather than having to do a windows search, and copy routine, like in step #1.

Eliminating shaky frame holds

2007-12-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

In a previous blog I mentioned I'd talk about getting good frame holds, so I'd better be true to my word. See my blog about getting good slow motion in Premiere for details on why frame holds can be shaky - I won't duplicate that here.

Shaky frame holds can be a sure sign of amateur work, but it's very easy to fix. The basic rule is this: ALWAYS deinterlace your frame hold clip (field options on the clip). It's now a still shot, so you don't need interlacing, and it can cause shakiness in any area of the frame where details differs from field to field (which is why someone's hand may be shaky in the frame hold when the rest is perfectly still). Some people prefer to simply export the frame and put the still .bmp or .tif on the timeline - that works too.

One other guideline - do not stretch out a frame hold clip by using speed - move the end point instead. Slowing it down too much (even though it's only one frame) can cause Premiere to do wierd things. If you're already at the end of your clip and need it to frame hold for more time, then repeat it - don't stretch the time. If you can't repeat it because you want a consistent zoom/pan across the entire frame hold, then put the individual clips in a separate sequence and then nest the sequence and zoom in on the sequence (which will be one "clip").

One other note - with CS3's time remapping feature, you can now gradually slow the footage down to a still, something I've longed to be able to do inside of Premiere for quite some time. Very cool. The deinterlacing rule still applies on the still frame.

VOB Files and Adobe Premiere - Editing from DVD

2007-11-12T09:40:00.001-08:00

I often find myself being given DVDs as source videos for a project. Whether it's creating a wedding video, a sports highlight film, a tribute video, or some other project, more and more people have their video footage on DVDs (only) these days. Obviously this is not a great situation for editing - the video file has already been compressed, so you've already lost quality to begin with. But the fact is that you have to work with what you've got.

You'd think that getting the files off the DVD to edit in Premiere (or the NLE of your choice) would be simple - copy the VOB files and drop them into Premiere. Oh that life were so simple. Premiere doesn't recognize VOB files. So you rename them to .MPG (or .AVI) and drop them into. That seems to work until you put one on the timeline and get no audio. If the DVD used AC3 as the audio track, then you'll have no audio because you can't bring an AC3 file into Premiere. I wish you could, but you can't - I think it's a copyright thing. Maybe you're lucky and the DVD you have was created using MPEG-1 Layer II as the audio. You drop it on the timeline and get audio but it just doesn't play back very well. Premiere stutters and playback is so bad it's unusable.

I've used a slew of tools to try to make this process easy on me and while there is no "Easy button" I've figured out something that works for me.

Enter VirtualDubMod. You can download it from sourceforge at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65889
Yeah, I know - it hasn't been updated forever, but it still works great. Sure it's not the most user friendly and pretty "open-source-ish" and to be honest I don't know what half of its features actually do, but it's a wonderful tool. The basic idea is that you open each VOB file and save it as an AVI. What? Render each file? That will take forever and gobs of hard disk space! Don't fret just yet, keep reading. (I'll talk using different tools to edit the compressed files later, but I prefer to edit with DV AVI files).

The first thing is getting the files off the DVD. Sure you can just copy them, and most of the time that works (for non-encrypted files) but sometimes it doesn't, you can get very weird results. For best results, I use another great little utility called DVDDecrypter. Its main purpose is really to break the Macrovision (or other) encryption on copyrighted DVDs and let you get at the video files. But that's a legal gray area, and that's not what I actually use it for. Most of the DVDs I'm given to use are not copy-protected. You can download DVDDecrypter from:
http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/

Ok, now you've got a bunch of .VOB files on your hard drive. It's time for VirtualDubMod. The first thing is that VirtualDubMod will create uncompressed AVI files. Many people think that's what they want, but actually it isn't. What you want (for optimal editing in Premiere) are DV AVI files, which VirtualDubMod doesn't make (out of the box). You have to get a DV AVI codec, which can be suprisingly hard to find. I use the Panasonic DV codec because it's free and you can download it from:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Panasonic_DV_Codec.htm
which also contains instructions on installing it. Once installed, it will show up as an available codec in VirtualDubMod (save as -> select AVI as the file type -> click change button -> select Panasonic DV Codec.) Now you can open the VOB file directly with VirtualDubMod and save it as a DV avi file and bring it into Premiere. Life's getting better (we're not done yet)!

Sometimes I have 10-12 DVDs of a whole football season and I need to make a highlight video. Sometimes the VOB files are little 5 minute clips on the DVD (depending on how it was created), so there are hundreds of VOB files. I don't want to open each one individually and click save as hundreds of times and wait for each file to transcode. Here's where VirtualDubMod gets cool. You can save that task for later, and then run them all at once with "Job Control." Ok, so that's better, but I still need to open the file (which takes a few seconds by itself), click save as, and give it a file name. That can still take forever. This brings me to the real reason I'm writing this article: scripting the VOB to AVI Job Control list for VirtualDubMod.

I wrote a little vbs utility (I know, you PHP and perl gurus out there are gagging) to search through a directory structure, find all the VOB files, and create a job control script that can be opened in VDubMod. (download link below) Ok, now your work flow looks like this:
1 - Use DVDDecrypter to get the VOB files onto your hard disk, in a separate folder for each DVD, all in the same parent folder. (I use two machines for this so I have two going at once, then copy the VOBs over to the same machine later)
2 - Run my script to create the Job Control List for VDubMod
3 - Open VDubMod, load the script, hit start and watch it crank away.
4 - Go to bed. It's going to be awhile. (Or if you have a fancy enough processor do something else while it's processing, like write a blog about it, which is what I'm doing write now. :-) )

Here is the script (lots of programs might complain about you downloading a VBS file, so I've renamed the extension to JRR. Rename it back to VBS after downloading):
createVirtualDubModJobs.jrr

My script is VERY unrefined, as I just created it. I'll probably refine it and upload a better version, but it works. You just need to edit the script and find the variables that set the parent folder for all your VOB files and the destination folder. The script assumes you have one parent folder with one or more subfolders that contain VOB files. Feel free to tweak to your liking.

Yes this will take gobs of hard disk space. Yes you still need to copy all the VOB files from the disks to your computer. Yes you still need to wait for VirtualDobMod to transcode all the VOB (MPEG II) files to DV AVI files.

Can't I just edit the VOB files in Premiere you ask? Yes - sort of. You can get a AVISynth Premiere Plugin, but it's a complicated, laborious process that you can't really script (have to do each VOB one by one). Also, I haven't played with it a lot, but I haven't had much luck getting it to work with Premiere CS3 anyway. If you want to look into it, here's the instructions and all download links for the relevant utilities:
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/forum/index.php?s=776d0be8c3c99092874bce53a3756694&showtopic=22869

ATI Avivo Video Converter

2007-06-20T08:18:00.001-07:00

I originally posted this on a different blog, but thought it was relevant for this blog as well:

This is a great product when it works. The accelerated rendering of AVI to MPEG2 is lightning fast, and is the main reason I purchased this card. HOWEVER, in true ATI fashion, the gui that lets you accomplish this is buggy. Specifically, if I export a movie to AVI from Adobe Premiere Pro and then try to encode it to DVD format (or MPEG2) with the Avivo Video Converter, the application will crash every time you try to move the slider bar to adjust the bitrate. I am putting this in my blog in the hopes that by some miracle someone else will stumble across it who may have found a workaround for this problem. It's driving me crazy. I have this expensive video card virtually sitting idle in my machine because I don't want to encode professional DVD video at a bitrate of 6.0 Mbps - I always use 7.0 Mbps and sometimes 8.0 Mbps. I've been working with ATI on this issue for 6 MONTHS now, and have been throu SIX, count 'em SIX driver revisions. There support is horrific at best to work with - they simply do not listen to what you are telling them. I have submitted trouble tickets, feedback to the catalyst crew, and feature requests. They have all fallen on deaf ears, and their support cannot give me a solution.

Slow Motion in Premiere

2007-06-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

With the new Premiere CS3, there's lots of talk about using the time remapping feature for variable slow motion (progressively slowing the clip down or speeding it up.) This is something that previously required After Effects, so it's pretty exciting to have that in Premiere. But that's not what I want to write about - I'm more interested in writing about how to achieve good slow motion results in Premiere Pro, especially when dealing with interlaced footage.

As a wedding videographer (and a sports videographer, where this article is even MORE relevant), I use slow motion ALL THE TIME. A little slow motion and the right song can do wonders for otherwise ordinary footage. But sometimes that slow motion causes your footage to become jerky, especially when using very low speeds with interlaced footage. What's the best way to get smooth slow motion (aside from filming at a higher frame rate)? I was struggling with this issue just tonight and came up with what seems (so far anyway - I need to test with more clips) to be a good solution.

First, let me address what is SUPPOSED to work, but doesn't seem to, or doesn't work all that great. First, Adobe will tell you to use the frame blend option. In my tests, this seemed to make little or no difference. Some will tell you to use integer multiples for your speed so that Premiere doubles (or triples, etc.) the frame rate evenly (50% = 2x, 33.33% = 3x, 25% = 4x, etc.). Again, with the particular clip I was having trouble with tonight, that seemed to help a LITTLE, but barely. Then there's always the time remapping feature in After Effects, but I wanted a solution that just uses Premiere. I've also come across suggestions to use the ReelSmart Twixtor plug-in - I haven't tried it - I don't really want to drop several hundred dollars on a plugin just to get good slow motion - shouldn't Premiere be able to handle this natively?

Enter the Posterize Time effect. Generally I've used this effect for slowing down frame rates when I actually want the footage to be jerky. Ever seen those commercials when they want to make something look really bad (like the competitor's product) or news stories about some nefarious scheme and they play footage in black and white with really jerky footage? There are rare occasions (think billion dollar man slomo sequences) where you actually want jerky footage. The plugin is also sometimes used to attempt to make 60i footage look like 24p to achieve a film look.

ANYWAY, I discovered that I can actually use this effect to INCREASE the frame rate of my clip and give me better slow motion. Of course,I'm not literally increasing the frame rate of the source footage - that would require reshooting at a higher frame rate. I'm just "pretending" or telling Premiere that it's a higher frame rate. To be honest, I don't know EXACTLY what Premiere does when you use this filter with a higher frame rate than the source footage, but from my empirical evidence, whatever it does, it works pretty well.

First, I asked myself what Premiere actually has to do to slow down footage. Well, it has to increase the number of frames playing in a given time frame. If I play back my footage at 50%, it needs twice as many frames to make the same clip take twice as long at the same frame rate. The extra frames are accomplished through interpolation. So taken to an extreme, at 10%, each frame would now be doubled 10 times. You can see how this would lead to jerky footage - instead of the picture changing 30 times per second (or each field changing 30 times per second, or 60 times overall, to be more accurate dealing with interlaced footage), the frame will only change 3 times per second. So I came up with this formula, which may be completely baseless, so take it for what it's worth - it just seemed to work. Original FPS / speed = FPS for Posterize Time filter. So my original clip is 30fps, I want to slow it down to 40%. 30 / .4 = 75. I apply the posterize time effect, set the frame rate to 75, and by golly, it looks pretty good. Of course, it still looks pretty good when the fps is set to 30, so the formula really isn't that important, just the concept of using the posterize time effect.

Realistically, I've found that Premiere does slow motion just fine at 50% and above. It's only when you drop below that that you start to have problems...and using progressive footage is a whole different story, as is the definition many consumer camera manufacturers use to define "progressive." The reason I mentioned sports videography at the beginning of this article is because jerky footage (as well as interlacing artifacts) is much worse when there is more action happening in the clip, or when the camera itself is moving quickly. There is more change in the image from frame to frame (or field to field). I've found that as you increase the fps on the posterize time effect, you can end up smoothing the video, but blurring it more, especially for high action shots. The frame blending and interpolation process attempts to sort of take the middle ground when creating extra frames, so when there's greater differences between each frame and each field, those created frames can be quite blurry. When slowing high action shots down to extreme slow speeds, you have a trade off between clarity and smoothness with the posterize time effect.

Related to this article is achieving good frame holds - ones that don't shake violently. That's another topic related to interlacing - maybe I'll address that another time...

An email response: interlacing, aspect ratio, bitrate, etc.

2006-12-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

I was recently helping someone with some general video editing questions using Premiere Elements (I use Premiere Pro, and I really don't know Elements that well). I ended up with a pretty lengthy response, so I thought it would be something I could post on this blog, since I hardly ever put anything here.

Original email:

Josh,

My name is ..., I spoke to ... and she said you wouldnt mind giving me some pointers using Adobe Premiere Elements. I was so impressed with the Highlight DVD that you made that I purchased the same camera that ... has and also bought Adobe Premeire Elements.

I tried to burn one of the games just to make sure it was working in "wide screen" but found that the video was very pixelated and rough. I also noticed that even though I formated it for wide screen, it was in 4.3.

I tried to use the Adobe help pages and couldnt find much help. I found a website that said I should make sure the 'average data rate" was the same on the video clip and the DVD project file. The clip is 1.1 MB / second. But I cant find anywhere to adjust that setting the project file.

Your DVD came out so smooth. Should I have bought a different version other than "Elements" or do you think Elements can suffice and theres just some tweeking I need to do.

I am a ... by trade and know how to use a computer but when it comes to graphical design and video rendering, Im kind of and idiot. Any suggestion or information that you could lend would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to reply to this email or call me at ...

******************************

My response:

This is really lengthy, sorry. I keep a blog (which I rarely edit) and thought my response might make good content for it, so that's why this is kind of long.

Premiere Elements is a great program, and what I recommend to most people looking to edit their home videos. I actually use Premiere Pro, which is in some ways similar, but in many ways very different. In addition, I use Premiere Pro to edit, and Encore DVD to actually author the DVD. Because of that, I don't know how much help I can be, but I'll do what I can.

When I create a new project in Premiere, the first screen asks me what type of project it is: NTSC vs. Pal, SD, HD, 4:3, 16:9, etc. It has presets that cover the basics. I edited the football video in a preset called "Widescreen 48khz" which is DV NTSC, 29.97 fps, 720x480 with a 16:9 ratio and a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio (the 48Khz represents the audio sample rate).

Pixelation is generally caused by overcompression, or using too low of a bitrate when transcoding the video to MPEG2. If you are using footage directly from ...'s camera then your source is HD 1080i footage, which has to be downsampled to SD to edit and burn to a DVD (in the next little while we will be able to edit in native HD and burn to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD but for now it has to be downgraded to SD or Standard-def to put on a DVD). However, ... did not give me the native footage, but rather clips burned to DVD using the software that came with the camera. This meant that by the time I got the footage, it was already downgraded to SD and compressed to MPEG2, but it was still great quality. Premiere Pro lets me edit natively in MPEG2, but I get much better performance working with uncompressed AVI files, so I actually took all of her footage and converted it into uncompressed AVI files before working with it. I essentially copied the .VOB files from the DVD and renamed them to .MPG, then transcoded them to uncompressed AVI files. If you look at a video DVD, it will generally have several .VOB files in the VIDEO_TS folder. These are just MPEG2 files with a .VOB extension. You can just copy them to your computer, rename them to .MPG and play them. Unless of course the disc is copy protected, then you have to use decrypting software like DVDDecrypter, but that is another story.

You mentioned that the video on the DVD was smooth - that actually was a bit of work, and I actually thought it could have been a lot smoother. Although ...'s camera is HD, it is still interlaced footage (like almost all consumer camcorders), and by the time I had the footage ready to edit I thought the interlacing artifacts were very distracting. Basically, interlacing is the fact that each frame is actually composed of two fields. One field represents every odd horizontal line of resolution, and the other field the even lines. What happens is when you have quick motion (like football - especially close up shots like ... running down the sidelines right next to the camera) is that the camera captures the first field, then when it gets the second field in the frame, the picture has changed by 1/60th of a second, which doesn't seem like much, but the player has moved ever so slightly from when the first field was captured. This causes interlacing artifacts, particularly along vertical lines. It can make the footage seem very shaky, enough to make you sick in extreme cases (particularly when combined with handheld footage - even the steadiest of hands produce shaky video). By the way, I'm told you did most of the filming of the games. I thought the footage was excellent, and is definitely one of the reasons the final highlight video turned out so good. Professional cameras film in 24p (for progressive), which means that there is 24 frames per second (as opposed to the 29.97 you get in most consumer cameras) and each frame only has one field, so there is no interlacing. A lot of consumer cameras claim to film in "progressive mode" but it is generally not "true" progressive like a professional camera would do, but that's another story. For the football video, I actually deinterlaced all of the footage. This is a trade-off. You trade smoothness for clarity, sort of. Deinterlacing is accomplished in a lot of different ways by different software, but the end result is that both fields in each frame are made to be identical. If you've ever paused a movie and had some part of the picture shake back and forth, that is as a result of interlacing - one field of the frame is in one place and the other field in another place, so it alternates between them when you pause it. Anyway, deinterlacing eliminates that problem and makes the movie much more clear, especially along lines of contrast, but it can make fast motion a bit more jerky, as the advancement from frame to frame can actually become detectable to the human eye - kind of like a little flip book. It especially becomes apparent in slow motion clips. If you look at the slow motion clip of ... (I think it is ...) jumping in the air to catch the ball (I think it is in beginning of "Rock you like a Hurricane") you can visibly detect the advancement from frame to frame. Good slow motion is very hard to achieve without a very nice, true progressive scan camera. The camera you bought actually has a feature to record 12 (I think) seconds of video at a higher frame rate, so that you can do extreme slow motion and still maintain a relatively high frame rate, yielding much better slow motion or stop frames.

Ok, having said all of that (some of which you may already know), let me try and answer your questions a little more specifically. To end up with widescreen footage you want to make sure that your project settings are widescreen, and that when you export it your export settings are also set to widescreen. You can potentially edit in 16:9 and export to 4:3 and vice versa. In Premiere Pro, when you select File -> Export -> Adobe Media Encoder, you get a dialog box that lets you choose from several presets and customize them if necessary. I can verify in this dialog that it is exporting to NTSC DV 16:9. I'm not familiar with the capture process with your camera, but its capture software may also have the option to convert to 4:3 when you pull the footage off the camera.

I can also specify the bitrate in this dialog box. I usually use 7 Mbps, which gives me roughly an hour of content per disc. There is also a generic "quality" setting which refers to lossy compression and should normally be set to 5 (on scale of 1 to 5). If you are encoding to 1.1 Mbps, you are going to get a lot of footage onto one DVD, but it is definitely going to be very pixelated and choppy - the only way to fix that is to increase your bitrate. I think you may be trying to get all the games onto one disc. At full quality, you only get one hour per DVD. The reason Hollywood movies are longer is because they are using 9 GB (roughly) DVD's instead of the 4.7 GB disks available to the general public. Unless you have your movies professionally authored, you can only use 4.7 GB disks. You can get dual layer DVD's and get double the capacity, but they are not going to playback in most DVD players. You can get two hours on a basic 4.7 GB disc using a lower bitrate (like 4 Mbps), and the quality is still somewhat ok. Anything above that and you really start seeing pixelation. It could be that the 1.1 you are referring to of the original clip is actually 1.1 megaBYTES per second, as opposed to 1.1 megaBITS per second. 1.1 MBps (bytes) would be equivalent to 8.8 Mbps (bits) per second. I'm not familiar enough with the camera and capture process to know what kind of clips you are dealing with.

The reason the Adobe help file refers to "average data rate" is because files are often encoded using variable bit rate. Any given portion of the video may be encoded at a different bitrate, depending on how much action and information is in each frame. The average bitrate in megabits per second (mbps) is roughly ((file size in MBytes) / (length in seconds) * 8). You can also use a utility like GSpot Codec Information Appliance (google it for more info) to tell you everything you'd ever want to know about your video file.

I don't think your issue is with using Elements as opposed to some other video editor - it's a matter of determining what type of source clips you are dealing with, what your project and export settings are, and how much you're trying to fit on one disc. Unfortunately I can't tell you exactly how to specify project or export settings in Premiere Elements. But you will at least want to make sure that when you play (in windows media player or whatever) the original clips captured from the camera that they look OK - I'm assuming that they do, otherwise you would have noticed the bad quality when editing them in Premiere.

Anyway, sorry for the novel. Feel free to ask me any follow up or more specific questions - I promise not to be so long-winded!

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And for anyone reading this blog, feel free to post any further comments, corrections, or clarifications to anything I've said here. I'm always learning from others!

Blending two images into each other in Adobe Premier Pro 2.0

2006-04-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

I was recently looking for an easy way to do a certain effect in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. I figured it out, so I'd thought I'd post my solution. Below is the copy of the post on Adobe's forums.

Link to the movie demonstrating the desired effect

Link to the PSD file used for the image matte

Pasted from Adobe's forum:
I am looking for away to accomplish an effect where I have two images on the screen. One fills the left half, one fills the right half. They blend into each other in the middle. The pictures then each move toward the middle and as they move, they continue to blend into each other. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to accomplish this. I would think you could just take a photoshop document that is half white, half black, blended in the middle, and then apply a luma matte to both images with one of them reversed. The problem with this (and any other type of matte I've tried to make work) is that the matte moves with the image. Any thoughts?

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After sleeping on this one I figured out a simple way to do it. Because the image matte moves with any motion keyframes on the image, I put the image in its own sequence, and animated it there. I then placed the image matte on the sequence, and since the sequence has no motion keyframes, the image matte stays put. All that's left is to then put the matte'd sequence on top of the other image that's moving into the center (which doesn't need a soft edge or anything else because the matte'd sequence is on top of it). I've put a sample of what I'm talking about on my blog at:
http://www.beyondpictures.com/blog/bp/2006/04/blending-two-images-into-each-other-in.html

FS-4, Citidisk DV, and other tapeless recording options

2006-04-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I've spent the better part of the day looking for an inexpensive, reliable tapeless recording system. There isn't one - at least not on my budget. Firestore's FS-4 looks like a great solution, but it's still a little pricey ($795 to $1,795 depending on the capacity and options). I found it at amazon.com for $744 but that's still a little rich for my poor budget.

I am amazed at the complete lack of options here. How long have MiniDV tapes been around and there's still not a decent affordable solution? It's not much more complex than a 40GB external drive - get it down in the $400-$500 dollar range and I'd consider it.

The only other competitor I could even find to Firestore was Shining Technology's CitiDisk DV. It seems to have all the options of the Firestore and twice the capacity for about the same price. It all sounds great, but there's a couple of things that make me nervous. From reading through their FAQ's, it's obvious they haven't bothered to have a person that actually speaks English proofread their documents. Plus, the latest updated FAQ I could find was August 2005 - more than six months ago. There are no distributors in the U.S. (they had a link to apple's store, but I couldn't find it anywhere on there). I did find the HDV version (supports both HD and DV) at bhphotovideo.com (versions ranging from $1,124.95 to $1,374.95.

With all the embedded Linux devices these days, can't someone make a simple camera mountable enclosure device that handles all of the formats, scene creation, etc., and let you buy your own laptop hard drive and stick in it? I guess the industry is moving more towards tapless video cameras, like Panasonic's P2, that have all the functionality of tapeless recording built into the camera.

I spent a little (keyword: little) time looking at P2 (panasonic's "revolutionary" tapeless format.) Sounds great if you have a panasonic camera and a ton of money - but not too relevant to me and my Canon GL2.

The main thing driving me towards a tapeless scenario is time. I sometimes film weddings in the morning, and the client wants to show nicely edited footage at the wedding dinner or reception that evening. It makes for a stressful day trying to film, capture, edit, render, and burn and a very short amount of time. I'm already forking out a fair amount of dough upgrading to a beefier computer (and the latest version of Adobe Production Studio - those could be separate blogs in and of themselves), but directly editing from my captured footage would sure save me some valuable time.

External Microphone for Canon GL2

2006-04-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

I have recently spent a fair amount of time researching which mic I should get for my Canon GL2. It is amazing how much information there is on the web - there a lot of people with a lot more time on their hands than I have! (You snicker as you note that I have time to blog this!) Anyway, I finally settled on the Rode NTG-2. I debated between that and the Audio Technica AT897. At the end of this article I'm going to list the sites I used to research this - there's a wealth of information out there. I will give you the brief reasons why I decided on this mix though. Cost - it is slightly cheaper than the AT897, and a really good mic for the money (about $249 retail.)

Performance - I was looking for a shotgun mic to concentrate the audio on what I was shooting at, eliminate the camera noise (although the GL2 does a great job with this already), and I wanted a mic I could position anywher by running XLR cables. I did look long and hard into XLR to mini-jack adapter unit, like the beatchtek dxa-6 (far superior to Canon's MA-300 for about the same cost) but in the end ended up just getting a simple XLR to mini-jack cable, mainly to cut costs (it was $13.00 as opposed to around $260 for a powered adapter that mounts to the camera).

I eventually will probably get a product like the beachtek dxa-6 for a couple of reasons. It will be nice to have the ability to supply phantom power for one. Also, I'd have the ability to have more than one mic and adjust each mic's levels prior to going into the camera. The Rode NTG-2 tends to overpower the GL2 in noisy situations - I've found that I am occasionally getting distortion, something that never happened using the GL2's mic. I've tried switching to manual levels on the GL2, but then it's a pain to adjust in situations where the noise level is changing (particularly when filming a speaker far away and having applause and laughter interspersed that overwhelms the audio feed). Plus it's near impossible to adjust left and right channels simutaneously on the GL2. The GL2 does a great job with it's automatic audio levels feature though - I just need to take the signal from the NTG-2 down a notch before coming into the camera, something I can do with the DXA-6.

Portability - I'm going to have situations where I need to position a mic near a speaker or stage (like getting wedding vows), and have the camera a fair distance away. For this reason I needed a standard XLR mic that could function as a normal mic, not just a video camera mic. Although if that's what your looking for, the Rode VideoMic is a great, inexpensive ($150) option for the consumer looking to get better sound from his camera and eliminate camera noise.

Well, I've said enough (although there's lots more to say!) Here's a list of links:

TOP 5 SHOTGUNS! (for those with a budget)- READ THIS! - DVXuser.com -- The online community for filmmaking
TOP 5 SHOTGUNS! (for those with a budget)- READ THIS! Audio
Canon Accessory Annex Home Page
"right angle xlr" mini jack - Google Search
Rode VideoMic - Camera Mounted Shotgun Microphone
BeachTek Audio Adapters - DXA-6

BeachTek Audio Adapters. We are here as your resource for unique audio products for your camcorder. Our customers include everyone from the hobby videographer to seasoned professional around the world. Unique audio accessories for digital camcorders such as the Sony VX1000 and Panasonic EZ1. Our products give you professional features to help you get superb results each and every time.
Review of the Audio-Technica AT897 Short Shotgun Microphone
A review of the Audio-Technica AT897 short shotgun microphone
Amazon.com: NTG2: Musical Instruments
Amazon.com: NTG2: Musical Instruments
The Must Have's by Martha Smith - The Digital Journalist
4073a
Camcorderinfo.com Message Board - outdoor interview mic? mke-300 vs rode videomic
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