Post Production System On a Budget

Posted by DVD Insider on Sunday, December 04, 2005 - 11:40 am:

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Challenge: Put together a video postproduction suite based on Hollywood’s
networked model on a shoestring budget

Difficulty: Surprisingly easy

Estimated time: 2-4 hours


Every professional videographer faces the same challenges – budget, time, budget, budget.

While capturing superb content is important, the real work begins in the post production operation. It is here that a videographer turns a script and good shooting into something that is exciting, entertaining, educational, audience grabbing and saleable.

With a little bit of planning and “creativity” it is now possible for any videographer to develop and use a post production system that is almost equal to the ones you see in big budget operations. This is because today almost every computer sold today is “video-ready.”

But to do the job properly, the system should have a Pentium III 800Mhz or AMD Athlon processor, a minimum of 256MB of RAM, USB 2.0 port and at least 10GB of hard disc space for video capture. For best results we’d recommend at least a Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM and two high capacity (80GB) hard drives. You can capture your analog video with the USB 1.1 port but the video quality will suffer.

If you’re going to distribute/sell your movie, you’ll need a DVD burner either in the system or externally. Because DVD burners and media are so economical, you’ll probably want to save your video project to broadcast quality DVD. All of today’s DVD burners write to both plus and dash R, RW and DL (dual layer) media. Don’t worry about the difference between plus or dash – its an inter-industry disagreement that was never settled so burners now do both and players play both.

Media Selection
The R (write-once) media is your final effort, your archive copy and the one you will want to distribute your movie on. The RW (rewritable) is the media you will want to use your project in-progress work on because you can edit and overwrite the content until you are completely satisfied with the entire project. The DL layer nearly doubles your content storage capacity 8.5GB Vs 4.7GB).

The 4.7GB media will allow you to store about 120 minutes of video content while DL media should be used if you want to add director’s cuts, outtakes, bloopers, enriched content and other professional video information. Most of the leading software – Adobe Elements, Sony Vegas and Ulead DVD MovieFactory or MediaServer Pro – will allow you to do advanced work including writing video data to single and dual layer media.

In choosing media for your movie storage, this is no time to skimp and save a few cents per disc. While discs may look the same, there is a performance/quality difference. Off-brand and no-name media purchased in bulk may not successfully burn or may loose content sooner rather than later because of poor production quality. If you spend days and months editing, authoring, tweaking and staging your content; there is a false saving in burning the movie to less than quality media.

Most content producers who make their living doing postproduction work will only use branded media such as Verbatim. The Verbatim media has become the disc of choice because the company is backed by Mitsubishi Chemical/Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM) which is the leading producer of media dyes and coating materials as well as advanced media production processes and techniques. The Verbatim media is used by all of the industry’s DVD burner/recorder manufacturers as well as the major software developers to test the performance of their units and the compatibility of their discs with all players.

Video Capture
For your video capture into the system, ADS Tech – www.adstech.com – offers two approaches. The PYRO AV Link or the Instant DVD approach. The PYRO AV Link is an extremely versatile external box which allows you to input any content – analog or digital – and output to any format. It is also available with your choice of Premier Elements or Sony Vegas software. Both packages are extremely robust and easy to use in the creation of your movie. The best Instant DVD solution for professional videographers is the Instant DVD +DV which enables you to input from any source and then use the Ulead DVD MovieFactory and VideoStudio software to do your post production editing and authoring. Both external boxes contain a very high performance hardware codec (encoder/decoder) that does all the hard work of converting your content to today’s digital format.

One of the first things anyone who does post production work learns is that all of the content – raw and work-in-progress – is overloading your system and you are constantly running out of disk space to store and retrieve the work.

You have four options - delete content you feel won’t enhance your video or be used, open your PC and install another drive, buy an expensive external drive solution or complete one project before you begin your next leg of the project so you can start with a clean hard drive.

Delete? Never! The minute you do, you know you’ll need it!

Open the system? That's only for techies -- creative people don't do that.

Expensive external storage? How much of an additional investment can you afford for your business? How much additional budget can you get?

Do each project in turn? If you are an independent videographer you have to juggle projects in various phases of completion from shooting to disc delivery. If you do educational and informational videos you are always rushing to meet deadlines without an increase in budget and you need to have immediate access to content because you can often refresh and recycle good content in multiple projects.

Best You Can Afford
The solution is what Hollywood’s postproduction facilities do: create a video editing/authoring postproduction system of your own that uses affordable powerful software-based editing solutions, such as Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas, Ulead’s MovieFactory Creator or Ulead Media Server Pro.

Get a quality LCD flat-screen monitor (or two if possible), stereo speakers, and the real secret: an array of drives (multiple hard drives and a DVD burner) configured in a daisy-chain stacked fashion that allows you to move content from one stage to the other directly from your desktop. The interconnected storage array cuts down on cable runs and desktop clutter.

This allows you to move quickly and seamlessly from one storage source to the other almost instantly. It even allows you to mirror content on multiple drives to always have a copy in the event of a hard drive failure. Best of all, you can move the entire project on a 200 – 500 GB HD from one workstation to another, take it home to work on it there or take the hard drive with you to keep the entire project safe and secure until you have completed your creative work.

The Basics
We're not going to spend a lot of time on the editing software or video or audio
monitors; there are plenty of reviews of Ulead’s, Adobe’s and Sony’s products. There are also plenty of advice out there to help you determine if you want to go the all-in-one Mac or choose a more open Windows-based system and solution.

About ergonomics -- Set up your system’s monitor(s) and speakers on
a flat surface, with the screen(s) and speakers within easy reach. Keep the monitors slightly lower than the top of your head, so you're looking slightly downward at it with the speakers on either side of the screen.

As many film and television postproduction editors will tell you, delivering a quality finished
product requires a comfortable creative environment - one in which you'll be able to sit at and work for long stretches of time as you carry out the editing and authoring process. The screen should be at a comfortable viewing angle to eliminate neck and eye strain and the speakers positioned so that you can hear without having to have the volume up high, which causes ear fatigue.

The ADS Tech Drive enclosures provide a flexible and economic approach to building and expanding your storage library. The ADS enclosures are stackable, can hold any of the types of drives commonly used (hard drives, DVD drives, tape drives). The reason for this approach over buying an external drive solution is that you can choose the manufacturer, capacity, speed and price that is right for your budget. In most instances you can save 50% of the cost with only five minutes of work. The units come with their own internal power supply and are preconfigured to support both FireWire and USB cabling.

The main source for content for educational and event videos will be your camcorder. If the cameras use the DV format, you can download the content to the computer via USB. In this approach the camera is being used as an external drive. About 20 minutes of digital footage will create a file about 4GB in size. For added content security, you may want to transfer the raw footage to recordable DVD media (DVD+/-R). Or for convenience, transfer the content to one of the HDs that are independent of the main computer’s storage solution.

Mixed Content
Videographers and postproduction personnel often want to include content from other sources, some of which resides on VHS tape. A converter, like ADS's Pyro AV Link, will convert analog information to the DV format. There's a myriad of other sources for content, including CDs, DVDs, streaming video from the web or television content (See sidebar on content protection). This is what makes the daisy-chained and stacked solution so useful: you can draw content out of an array of sources without constantly swapping out discs or connecting/disconnecting external drives. FireWire connections allow as many as 16 drive devices to be daisy-chained
sequentially with no device ID conflicts. You probably won't need more than three to six devices especially if each ADS drive kit contains a 400GB hard drive giving you sufficient capacity to work on multiple video projects in parallel.

USB connections can't be daisy-chained, but a USB hub, such as the ADS Ultra Hub 4, will enable five to seven drive devices to be accessed instantly (theoretically you could connect up to 127 devices). Also, with FireWire and USB, unlike SCSI, you don't have to worry about terminators or device IDs. ADS's FireWire enclosures provide ports for both FW 800 and 400, so they are backward compatible with older systems that only have FW400 ports.

FireWire or USB - it's your call.

Either works perfectly and anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot SCSI conflicts and termination errors will appreciate their ease of use.

Furthermore, most new drives enter the market as internal versions. Having cases for them in the form of format-agnostic drive housings gives you an edge on accommodating higher capacity, higher speed drives.

Area Set-Up
Position the drive stack near the editing/authoring station, but not necessarily on top
of it. You can place on the desktop or off to the side. Either the FireWire or
USB hub options will result in only a single cable to the computer. (Which can also be off the desk for clean, open workspace. Leave an area between the computer and the drive stack to avoid thermal buildup.)

In a typical beginning or low volume postproduction environment, you'll have two hard drives
and one or two DVD-R player/burners - one as a content storage device and one as the
"final mix" platform. This approach to drive management allows you to keep your drives at the leading edge in terms of performance and capacity.

It also has another benefit: you can run multiple OS - Windows, Mac or Linux - without having
to reformat/partition the computer's internal drive.

With your drive array in place, you can begin to edit in the "A/B roll" style: previewing content from various drives before assembling them at the post production workstation. Hollywood film and video editors do this with TB-capacity drives networked throughout their post facilities. You can achieve a similar installation for your organization’s video service or for your event videography business.

The result is a comprehensive video postproduction facility at a fraction of the large solution approach.

# # #

Sidebar: Content Protection
There's been a lot of controversy about content and intellectual property (IP)
protection in recent years. Most content that you don't create yourself is copyrighted
in some way or another, and the law carries significant penalties for commercial
misuse of IP.

However, the law can also be on your side. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Act of
1998, you are allowed to use copyrighted material that you have acquired legitimately
for personal and possibly for educational use. The license to do so is implicit in the act of purchasing the content, in the form of DVDs, CDs, still photos or other graphics.

For more information:
www.adstech.com
www.verbatim.com
www.adobe.com
www.ulead.com
www.sony.com