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Video-Capture Tutorial PDF Print E-mail
Written by Jeremy Butler   
Friday, 03 November 2006
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Video-Capture Tutorial
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Capturing Video

click to view movieAs noted at the start of this tutorial, we've created a clip from Nothing Sacred (1937) that shows how a montage sequence can compress narrative information. Its interplay of editing and sound would be lost in still images. (To view it, use the user ID "guest" and the password "tvcrit"--without the quotation marks.)

Let's now explore how we created this clip.



How Was This Video Clip Created?

In theory, the process is relatively simple:

  1. Capture/import the video signal into a computer.
  2. Process the video--turning it into a QuickTime "movie" (as Apple likes to call QuickTime clips) optimized for a specific purpose.
  3. Incorporate the QuickTime file into a Web page, CD/DVD-ROM, classroom presentation, and so on.

In practice, these steps require a little DV (digital video) expertise and some basic DV hardware and software, but not much beyond what we have already used to create still-image captures in the Frame Grab Tutorial.

Video Formats

You may note that we've chosen to use QuickTime as our format. There are many other formats that could be used (notably, Flash video, which is popular on sites like YouTube), but we've found that QuickTime works well for us. Plus, it enables us to easily create podcasts.

Capture software differs greatly in the specific process and we cannot cover all the possibilities here, but we will take you through the process with commonly and cheaply available software -- both in Windows and on the Mac.

Essentially, we want to end up with a video file with the following characteristics:

  • Video
    • Format: AVI
    • Video encoding: DV
    • Image size: 720 pixels by 480 pixels
      • Note that this is not a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio as one would expect from a pre-widescreen film or a video image! Rather, it's 1.5 to 1. The seeming aberration is caused by the rectangular (not square) nature of video pixels--as is explained on page 5.
      • Some DV software automatically converts the video image to 640 by 480. That's fine, too.
    • Frames per second: 29.97
      • Some DV software automatically converts the fps to 30, which is acceptable.
  • Audio
    • 16-bit stereo or mono
    • Sampling rate: 48 kHz

Capturing Video In Windows

The leading digital video editor that comes in a Windows version is Adobe Premiere Pro, but using it for basic video capture is like crushing a cockroach with a sledgehammer. Fortunately, Adobe has released a slimmed-down, "lite" version of this program and called it Premiere Elements. While the "Pro" version will set you back about $850 ($300, if you're a student), you can find the Elements version for well under $100 -- often bundled together with Adobe Photoshop Elements. Students can even buy an "academic" version for $70. (All prices as of October 2006.)

  1. Follow the procedure outlined on page 2 to physically connect an analog video source (VCR or DVD player) to the computer.
  2. Before reading further you may want to click here -- or click the thumbnail image below -- to view APE's editing set-up in a separate browser window in order to follow along with the next steps.
    click for larger image
  3. Import a short clip into APE--including a few seconds on either side of the frame you want to grab. APE calls the importing process "capturing" video. Please refer to APE's documentation for more details, but here are the basics:
    1. Click the Get Media icon on the left.

      (Confusingly, there is also a similar icon up at the top, in the task bar. If you click it, you'll next click Capture.)
    2. Select the source of your video (DV Camcorder, if you're connecting via FireWire or USB)

      which will open the Capture Panel.
    3. In the Capture Panel, use the controls to cue the video to the spot you desire. Then click the Get Video and Stop Capture buttons to start and stop your capture.
    4. The new clip will be inserted into your project and appear in the Media panel in the upper left of the screen.
  4. Put the clip you want to use into what APE calls the "sceneline"--the part of the screen where you arrange video and audio to make a movie.

    We've put a clip from the classic driver's ed film Signal 30 in our sceneline.
    • Note: Most professional editing programs use timelines instead of scenelines. APE offers that option, but, in the case of basic video editing, it makes no difference if you use a timeline or a sceneline; and APE's default is the sceneline.
    • [Tech note for nerds: How much disk space is needed?]
  5. Edit the clip as necessary. You may trim it, add titles or effects, put several clips together into a single movie, and so on.
  6. From the File Menu, choose Export Movie to start the video saving process.
  7. Click the Settings button to reveal the settings for both video and audio. Verify that your settings match those above.
  8. Click the Save button.
  9. Type in a name for your AVI file--say, NothingSacred.avi.
  10. Click OK to start the AVI file creation process. This is generally a slow process. The actual time depends on the speed of your computer and the length of your video.
  11. Now that you have a suitable AVI file, you're ready to use QuickTime Pro to further process your clip. [Or you could just use APE to generate a QuickTime file.]

Capturing Motion Images On a Mac

When working on a Mac, the default video format is usually QuickTime, which is not surprising since QuickTime was invented by Apple. Even though you're thus one step closer to the finished product than when working on the Windows platform, you're not finished yet.

[Quicktime Pro for Mac only now captures video so this step is unnecessary See:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/creatingmovies.html ]

The problem? IMovie, the free video editing software bundled with all Macs, does not create properly optimized QuickTime files for our purposes. Consequently, we're not going to rely on iMovie to process our QuickTime files. Instead, we're going to process iMovie's files in a similar way to the processing of Windows AVI files.

That is, once we use iMovie to capture video from our analog source, we'll further process it with QuickTime Pro--as is explained [ where is it explained?] in part 6.

To prepare for this processing, you need to:

  1. Follow the procedure outlined on page 3 to physically connect an analog video source (VCR or DVD player) to the computer using a FireWire or USB connection.
  2. Use iMovie to handle the importing process. A tutorial explaining this is available here.
  3. Before reading further you may want to click here -- or click the thumbnail image below -- to view iMovie's editing set-up in a separate browser window in order to follow along with the next steps.
    click for larger image
  4. If you've imported more than one clip, click on a single clip's icon to select it.

    Drag the clip to the timeline in order to edit it.
  5. IMovie will automatically create QuickTime files from clips you import--naming them sequentially: "Clip 01," "Clip 02," "Clip 03," and so on. In our Northern Exposure example, however, we imported a previously named QuickTime file. You can see that clip resides on the shelf and is titled "Norther...ure.mov" (its title is slightly truncated; see screenshot).
  6. You're now finished with iMovie and may close it.
  7. IMovie stores these QuickTime files in a folder titled "Media," which resides within a folder bearing the title you gave your iMovie project.

    For this demonstration, I created an iMovie project called "Test" and imported 1 minutes and 57 seconds of Northern Exposure into it--which took up 404 megabytes of disk space (DV files are not small!).

    [Tech note for nerds: how much disk space is needed?]

    We can use the Mac Finder to open the Test folder and click on NorthernE...ure.mov 01 (see below)--although your imported video might be named Clip 01 or the like. One cool thing about the Mac Finder and QuickTime is that you can preview QuickTime files without leaving the Finder--as you can tell from the QuickTime controller beneath this Northern Exposure image.

    This Finder display also informs us that this iMovie-Document file is 720 pixels wide and 480 pixels tall.
    • Note that this is not a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio as one would expect from a standard-definition video image! Rather, it's 1.5 to 1. The seeming aberration is caused by the rectangular (not square) nature of video pixels--as is discussed above.
  8. Make note of the location of this file on your hard drive as you'll need to know it as we process our QuickTime file.
  9. You're now finished with iMovie and ready to use QuickTime Pro to further process your clip--as we explain in part 6.


Last Updated ( Thursday, 08 February 2007 )
 
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