MAKING HOME MOVIES

Making home movies has interested me ever since the mid 1980s, when I first managed to scrape enough money together to purchase my first video camera. That was made by Sharp. I don't recall the model except that the camera and the tape deck were separate units. The tape deck was carried in a canvas pack with a shoulder strap. From recollection, the battery units were bigger than some of today's camcorders. In those days editing home video involved a lot of patience trying to sync frames on the camera deck with a tape in the home video recorder / player.

How times have changed. Now footage can be captured on lightweight digital camcorders and then edited and assembled into movies, using just about any PC.

Windows XP comes bundled with entry level software for doing this called Windows Movie Maker. Most of my own experience has been gained using Pinnacle Studio. The most recent version of Pinnacle Studio which I have used is Version 8. At the time of writing this, Version 10 is available and Version 11 is rumored to be on the way. I want to upgrade, but am waiting for Windows Vista to stabilise, before investing in a new PC and Up to date Pinnacle Studio software.

My version of Studio came bundled with an analogue and digital capture card. You may already have means of capturing video into your PC, in which case you will just need the Studio software, not the capture card.

I have captured footage from old VHS tapes using the analogue capture facility and recordings made with my most recent camcorder, using the digital inputs. Once captured into Studio it is all digital, so you can combine old and new footage into the same movie.

It is best to have a powerful PC, with plenty of memory and disc space as well as a good video card. It is probably better to have at least two physical hard drives and to set the software up so that when video is being processed, the input or source video resides on a different physical drive to the output, resulting, or destination video. This is because assuming the video is a contiguous or almost contiguous file, then the disc heads would only require minimal movement in one area of the disc to read video and minimal movement in one area of the other disc to write video. If both the source and destination areas are on the same drive, then the disc heads would need to keep moving from one to the other. This would slow down the process and put more wear and tear on the disc drives. It is also advisable to frequently defragment drives used for video processing.

In essence the process of making a movie consists of Capture, Edit, Output.

So long as there is sufficient disc space available, it is usually best to capture footage at a higher quality than the intended target format. It is easier to reduce quality in the final output than to increase it. In Studio there are options to use automatic scene detection, or to split the scenes based on a period of time or not to split them at all. I have found the automatic scene detection to be good for most uses. However if you just want to archive a complete movie and output it exactly as it was, then scene detection should be switched off, unless you plan to allow chapter selection on the output media such as DVD.

The editing stage contains several steps in itself. This first consists of assembling the scenes in the required order. One film sequence may include some footage that is not wanted in the final movie. In that case it may be necessary to drag two or more copies of the same scene into the movie and set the start and end points for each so that the footage to be deleted is not included. This also allows for the same footage to be repeated or for it to be assembled in a different sequence to the one it was captured in. Studio allows each scene to be moved through quickly using a slider, or frame by frame using an incremental counter.

Once the scenes have been trimmed and assembled, we can work with the sound track. This might include silencing or reducing the volume of parts we don't want (e.g. wind blowing in the microphone, the cameraman swearing etc.). We could also add a background music track and fade it in and out at appropriate parts of the movie.

We can use standard templates or build our own titles at the front and end of the movie. They can also be included during the movie if required. Titles can be static or moving. They can be made from a still picture, or a snapshot of a movie frame, or text can be scrolled over the movie footage as it is running.

While it is often fine to jump from scene to scene, adding transitions can make things flow more smoothly. In the picture above we can see how transitions are being dragged onto the scene splits in the movie. The movie I was making in the picture above, was of a trip I made to Myanmar (Burma).

Click HERE to see some typical transitions

To view the movie clip above you will need to be able to play .wmv files using a player such as Windows Media Player. I made this video a few years ago so don't remember which camera I was using. It is clear though that I would have benefited from having a smoother zoom and either using a tripod or having a built in steady shot facility. The clip above is a short extract of the complete movie. We start with a black screen, which transitions to the movie, which is zooming in towards the Buddha's left nostril. during this clip there is overlayed Burmese music, followed the sound of birds (the bird sounds were captured by the camcorder at time of shooting). We then transition to a scene shot through the window of an aircraft, which is accompanied by an announcement (again captured at the time by the camcorder) that we are about to land at Mandalay. This clip was too short, so I transitioned it to another flying clip. This clip just had unpleasant engine sounds, so I silenced them and again overlayed some Burmese music. Finally we transition back to a black screen. So in total this 30 second clip contains 4 transitions.

Once the movie is playing in Studio, as we want it, it is time to output it. We could output it as a file which will run on the internet, such as the .wmv file above (also formats for other players like RealPlayer and QuickTime could be used), or we might want to burn it to VCD or DVD. With the right hardware interfaces the movie could also be written out to an analogue media such as VHS tape or back to a camcorder.

When burning DVDs we will often want to include menus, which allow us to navigate to different parts of the movie or to multiple movie on the same DVD. A number of software video editors, including Pinnacle Studio include facilities and templates for doing this. Resulting VCDs and DVDs should be playable on both PCs as well as dedicated DVD players such as those attached to domestic televisions.