When your earlobes have little chunks missing in the exact shape of little rat teeth, don’t despair. It’s natures way of saying ‘hi’. You too can develop such communicative capacities, and intimately reach out to the earlobes and eyelids of the population at large. There are many methods available, but today we’ll look at getting your video online.
Capturing Vidi-Yo
First up, you’d be wanting to get your camera vidi-yo clips or vhs samples onto your computer. Variety of ways will get this happening for you. Built in firewire ports on newer computers allow you to digitally capture from mini-DV cameras, and some of these cameras allow you to record AV-in as well, meaning you can string a cable from the vcr into the camera and capture that too. If you don’t have firewire, you’ll need some sort of video capture card which will allow you to plug a video signal into your computer, and these are getting cheaper all the time, and range in price according to quality of capture.
Once you’ve got the video signal transferring onto your computer, there’s a few other things to consider. You’ll need to choose a software package to select settings for capturing video. Usually this is also your editing software, and will let you select what type of compression and frame size you need. For the web, 320×240 pixels and 15 frames a second is more than enough to capture at, and you’ll probably be making it smaller again before uploading.
Editing Vidi-Yo
Growing options all the time here. Computer based editing has mostly been Adobe Premiere to date, with Final Cut Pro recently emerging as a better solution on the mac. Macs also let you edit within Quicktime pro. There’s a range of tools emerging though for live video use which also have the capacity to layer, mix and sequence clips, software you can see at: www.audiovisualizers.com. Many of these also allow timebased controls to apply edits of sorts while listening to music. Once the final clip is ready, however you’ve done it, you’ll need to format it ready for the web.
Formatting Tha Lil Buggas
You’ll need to compress the clip so it’s small online, and for this the nominees are:
Real Video – the first hugely popular ‘streaming’ media format which allowed users to see the beginning of a clip while the rest was downloading instead of having to wait for all of it b4 u could watch.
Windows media player – with all of Bill’s resources behind it, you’d wonder why it isn’t more stable. Some predict this will outlast the others, but we’ll see.
Quicktime – now streaming, and widely used stable cross platform format.
And the winner is: QT for movs under a minute, real video for above. Not that I’ll fight to the death over that. Have a bit of a read up.
Beaming Up
You’ll then need some server space for your clip which you can find for free online if you look, and when you’ve made some html pages that embed or point to the clip, tis time to send ’em all up. And presto, you’ve got your own TV station.