The unicycling movie making thread...

[andrew_carter]

I did a little search and came up with:

http://www.adobe.com/products/tips/premiere.html
http://www.ronniet.demon.co.uk/Tutor...obePremier.htm
http://www.effectivemarketingsecrets..._premiere.html
http://www.tutorialfind.com/tutorials/adobe/premiere

On the third of those links search for the word 'slow' and you'll see what to use to do slow motion.

That last one looks great. I haven't read through it yet but it looks good.

Good luck,
Andrew

[Robbie]

Thanks andrew, you rule. I'm not sure if I'll put the video (if we ever get one done) on the internet but I'll send you one just to show there's other guys in Australia unicycling aswell

We truly are a rare breed... well relatively. Nothing like people who skate. And I'm talking those who take it seriously, not just riding down the street :P

[andrew_carter]

Yes, that's why it's so great to meet other passionate unicyclists. I'd love a copy of your movie, thanks. At the rate you're learning, it should be really good. Our movie will be available for download here at unicyclist.com and a DVD-quality DVD (funnily enough) will be made as well. I'll send you one of the DVD's.

Andrew

[Robbie]

Whoa send me a DVD. I don't post much but I'm just guessing sending something from where you live (Brisbane right?) to Western Australia might still cost a bit

I dunno. Anyway, I'm gonna see how I progress and hopefullt one day even go to the UniNats. Man that'd be fun. Anyway, thanks again for all the sites you got me, should make it easy to make a video now having:

A new DV Tape, 60 minutes for pure unicycling recording.
The best video editing software out there (supposedly).
A DVD burner.

Thanks again and I'll look at sending you a copy of DVD aswell. I just havn't had much experience sending things interstate. In fact it's been years since I"ve sent a letter, everyone just uses e-mail.

Alright I better get off now, cya.

[john_childs]

Originally posted by andrew_carter
The codec worked fine, but I observed something interesting. Only the program that created the files (Windows Movie Maker) can play them back truely how they're meant to look. With VirtualDub for example, it's a bit blurry from fast motion. I guess I'll have to do my chopping off ends of clips elsewhere. Oh well.

Thanks a lot for all your advice John.

Andrew

Does that motion blur look like the motion blur in your Movie Teasers gallery?

That motion blur is caused by interlacing. The source video is interlaced. You're playing it back on a computer that is progressive. Interlaced video looks good on an interlaced TV, but gets that motion blur when played on a progressive scan display like a computer.

The fix is to deinterlace the video. VirtualDub has a filter that will deinterlace the video. After the deinterlacing the video will look sharp when played back on the computer.

There is a guide here about interlacing. There are other informative guides about interlacing on video sites like DVDRhelp 100fps.com Doom9 and others.

Your camera is obviously recording video in interlaced mode. I don't know if it would be better to have the camera record in progressive mode or not. That would be a question better answered by people more familiar with making DVDs. Progressive video will look better when played back on the computer. I don't know how it will look when played back on a TV. Progressive video will also be easier to edit.

One problem with deinterlacing video is that you loose half of the vertical resolution when you deinterlace. Some deinterlacing algorithms attempt to minimize the loss of vertical resolution by combining the two interlaced frames together, but that creates other artifacts like blurriness around the edges of moving objects.

I think the interlacing is also messing with the WMV compression which is causing the strange compression artifacts around the moving objects in the Movie Teaser videos.

First thing to do is play with the deinterlacing filter in VirtualDub so that the video you put in the gallery looks better.

The other thing is to figure out if it would make more sense to record your video in progressive mode. You already have stuff in interlaced mode so you might want to stick with interlaced.

In any event, you're going to have to understand the effects of interlacing so that the final DVD looks good and so that you can properly edit the video without causing weird interlacing effects.

[andrew_carter]

...it's perfect for someone like me. It's really simple and you can get tutorials from the microsoft.com website. I've transferred all of my video onto the computer (but I'm still going to keep it on the tapes) and I'm now really worried...is the best quality available on WMM when capturing video good enough for my DVD? I used something that's apparently meant for when you plan to put the video back to a tape and play it on TV. It's about 5Mbps.

Can somebody please either tell me what I want to hear or let me down gently?

Anyway, back to WMM2. I made a little practise movie after downloading WMM2 (at 850kbps!!!) and I used heaps of cheezy transitions like the star wipe. Ah, the Simpsons.

I'm going to use Adobe Premier for my editing and I'm hoping that with it you can change the duration of the fades between clips so that they're really subtle. I love movies with subtle fading.

Andrew

[bugman]

Andrew, What you can do in WMM2 is overlap the clips for a transition effect. I have been playing with that and really like the end result. It is similiar to fading.

[andrew_carter]

Excellent! Thanks a lot for telling me. I want our movie to be DVD quality but have only minimal effects, etc and have the focus on the riding rather than the editing. Today I had a play around and added music with fading in and out and changed the levels of the music and sound effects and did some other thigns. Do you think I could do everything I need to do for our movie on WMM2? It would make things a lot easier because it seems a lot simpler than Adobe Premier. I initially didn't think you could save high quality versions of movies with WMM but I discovered how to save as DV-AVI today. The tutorials at www.windowsmoviemakers.com are very helpful.

Thanks,
Andrew

[john_childs]

Originally posted by john_childs
There is a guide here about interlacing. There are other informative guides about interlacing on video sites like DVDRhelp 100fps.com Doom9 and others.

The 100fps.com web site is back up after having exceeded bandwidth amounts last month.

That site has a very good explanation of interlacing and some examples of what can happen if you don't edit interlaced video properly. For example, resizing interlaced video is a bad thing and the site shows an example of why that is.

The high frame rate deinterlacing solutions are a bit of overkill in many cases. For playback on a computer, video at 50 fps or 60 fps is overkill for many uses. It takes a high powered computer to keep up with that video feed (my 1.2 GHz Athlon can't keep up with some of the high bitrate high fps sample videos). The high fps videos are also about twice as large as they would be at 30 fps which less optimal for downloading.

[andrew_carter]

Thanks a lot John. I had a good look through the site. It's very interesting. I really like this page - http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frame...humans_see.htm - and was fascinated by this comment...
"Imagine yourself in a very dark room. You have been there for hours and it's totally black. Now light flashes right in front of you. Let's say as bright as the sun. Would you see it, when it's only 1/25th of a second? You surely would. 1/100th of a second? Yes. 1/200th of a second? Yes. Tests with Air force pilots have shown, that they could identify the plane on a flashed picture that was flashed only for 1/220th of a second."

The computer side of is is all beyond me though. Why does Windows Media Player play back the videos crisply whereas VirtualDub shows the bluriness?

Andrew

[baar]

Cinelerra is an open source ``Movie studio in a Linux Box'', see http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

It looks promising and quite professional. I have compiled it succesfully (binaries are also available) and played a little bit with it, but not enough to give a good opinion.

John

[john_childs]

Originally posted by andrew_carter
The computer side of is is all beyond me though. Why does Windows Media Player play back the videos crisply whereas VirtualDub shows the bluriness?

I don't know what is going on there. Maybe Windows Media Player is doing some automatic de-interlacing for you. PowerDVD will do automagic de-interlacing if it detects you are playing an interlaced DVD. Maybe Windows Media Player is doing the same.

Maybe the video is getting resized somewhere along the way and causing the funny resized interlaced effects that are on the front page of 100fps.com.

I don't know.

Maybe someone at the Unofficial VirtualDub Support Forums might know what's going on. Screen captures or frame captures of what's going on might also help.

[andrew_carter]

I'll attach a frame taken from the video using VirtualDub, then in the next post, one taken with Windows Movie Maker.

Another interesting thing is that Windows Movie Maker resizes the video to 4:3 whereas, even though it was captured with WMM, VirtualDub plays it at something slightly different.

Andrew

[andrew_carter]

This one is taken from WMM2. Another thing I've noticed is that the colours of the video in WMM2 are really nice and striking but when you capture a photo with it, the resulting pictures aren't as nice.

[john_childs]

VirtualDub is definitely showing an interlaced frame. And Windows Movie Maker 2 is showing a deinterlaced frame. WMM2 is doing some sort of automagic deinterlacing, probably a BOB because I don't see a blending effect.

Ask in the Windows Movie Makers Forums what's going on.

You should find out what type of deinterlacing WMM2 is doing. Is it throwing away one of the interlaced fields? Is it doing a BOB and doubling the framerate? When you edit and save your video in WMM2 do you loose the interlacing? If WMM2 is throwing away one of the fields in the interlaced frame you are loosing half of the data in your video and loosing half of your vertical resolution.