50 years of the Hawker Hunter
A two and a quarter minute film about the Hawker Hunter.
Land Rover Day
A two and a half minute film of the Landrover Meet, Stoneleigh 2001.
Try these short films - if they work (or even if they don't!) drop me a line at video@garethhorne.co.uk and let me know!
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50 years of the Hawker Hunter A two and a quarter minute film about the Hawker Hunter.
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Land Rover Day A two and a half minute film of the Landrover Meet, Stoneleigh 2001.
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Use your standard video editor to produce a short video project, save this as a standard Digital Video AVI file and then sent back to the camcorder. As I have said previously I prefer to keep my finished projects on digital tape that I can go back to at a later date, rather than relying on a heavily compressed file on CD-R or DVD-R. Many video editors can produce RealMedia files straight from the timeline, but personally I have been disappointed with the quality, and so avoid using this option. When I wish to produce a RealMedia file I take my archived file and recapture it using AVI_IO or ScenanalyzerLive so I have a type 2 MainConcept AVI file to work with. (If you are using Adobe Premiere rather than Media Studio Pro then you will already have a type 2 AVI file that can be fed into part two.) |
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Prior to encoding the video the files, they must be converted from full D1 frame, interlaced PAL video to a smaller sized, progressively scanned file. For this I used VirtualDub, in conjunction with Huffyuv, a lossless codec, to try to maintain as much quality as possible. Two filters are needed, the smart deinterlace by Donald Graft, and the resize (precise bicubic) one. Since the file is to be played back on a computer monitor rather than a TV screen the aspect ratio must be corrected since computers use square pixels rather than the rectangular ones of the PAL TV system. Resizing to 240 by 180 pixels gives a reasonable sized video for streaming with the correct aspect ratio. Since the audio can remain unchanged it can be left set to direct stream copy. With the two video filters set, resave the project with a new file name. The project will then render to give a progressive, resized, aspect ratio corrected video ready for encoding.
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The video file can then be encoded using RealProducer Basic 8.5. This is the most basic, (but free!) encoder provided by Real, and can be difficult to find on their website since they hope you will purchase there 200 dollar encoder. At the present time its available here, but who knows for how long! When RealProducer is started a wizard launches guiding you through the encoding process. Since the file is to be streamed from a standard web server choose the "single-rate for web servers" option (if you wish to include a broadband option like I have done above you will need to encode the video twice to give two separate files). Choose the Target Audience, but remember whilst broadband rates produce nice video the vast majority of visitors will still be on dial up modems so always include a 56k version. Under Options=>preferences=>video codec set encoding to "2 pass encoding" since this allows the encoder to analyse the video prior to actually encoding it. When you are satisfied with all the settings press start and wait a few minutes for the video to encode (compared to the MPEG2 encoders these files are much quicker to create!)
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http://www.ghorne.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vidtest/landrover_56k.rm
for example. This was then saved as landrover_56K.rpm and uploaded into the same directory. Take great care to ensure all file names and extensions match exactly and keep file names short to avoid potential problems. From the feedback I've received from this page it appears that these files usually stream ok, although net congestion can sometimes cause problems. Whilst this method of streaming video over the internet is not as good as using dedicated video servers it does have the advantage that it is costs nothing to try and is usually good enough for small scale, hobbyist sites such as this.