Yesterday I took my camera for a walk along the bayou that runs around our neighborhood. I decided to just take a shot of what’s in front of me every so often, and then stitch the shots together and see what I get. This is the route where I usually run, about 4½ miles round-trip, I think.
The day was overcast and cool here in southeast Texas (Katy, near Houston), so without good light I wasn’t expecting great results, but I went ahead with it. I stitched it all together (474 photos in all) using the Aperture 3 slideshow tool, and then brought it into Final Cut Express to add the music and titles at the end.
The little black dog is our terrier Cocoa, she likes to go running with me. Music is Siren by Emancipator, one of my favorite artists.
For any non-professionals doing video editing on a Mac I thought I would post a resource here that helped me a lot with getting started on Final Cut Express, one of Apple’s products in this category.
Apple has three video editing and production software packages, each one developed for different levels of skill and experience.
I started out with iMovie a few years ago and found it to be a good tool for creating videos. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun to work with. The newest version—iMovie ′11—has brought the product a long way from its early versions, with added features and creative tools that most anyone can learn quickly. iMovie is a great tool to start with and most people will probably never need anything else to create professional-looking home videos. It’s a very strong entry product. Apple has some good iMovie tutorial videos on their site for those just getting started with it.
While iMovie is a terrific application, its simplicity is due in part to the fact that it exposes a limited amount of the underlying technology behind video editing and does a lot of the work for you. After using it for a while I wanted to learn more so I upgraded to Final Cut Express ($199 for the full version, $99 upgrade). FCE is much closer to the professional product, Final Cut Studio, than it is to iMovie. The interface and editing environment in FCE are mostly identical to the pro version. FCE is not a minor step up from iMovie and has a fairly steep learning curve if you’re new to video editing.
When I first launched FCE I immediately realized that I needed to learn some basics. The interface (screen shot below) consists of a Browser, Viewer, Canvas, Timeline and various controls in the Tool Palette. Where do you start, and what can you do with all this? I had no idea.
The resource that helped me get started with FCE is Izzy Video’s free Final Cut Express Tutorial for Beginners. Izzy (Israel Hyman) has done a fantastic job of walking newcomers through the process of capturing video into FCE, setting up your assets (video clips, sound, images, etc) in the Browser, editing clips in the Viewer, laying it all out in the Timeline and exporting to a finished product. After a couple of hours with Izzy’s tutorials I was up and running, much quicker than if I had just used the FCE User Manual. The product manual is good, but nothing beats a live demonstration for getting acquainted with a complex software package.
I really appreciate that Izzy took the time to create these excellent tutorials and has posted them for free. He has an enormous amount of great content on his site (www.izzyvideo.com) as well as instructional podcasts (iTunes link). If you’re looking to improve and expand your video skills, I encourage you to check out everything he has to offer—he’s very talented on the technical points, and a really good instructor.
If you’re interested in the history of innovation, James Burke’s BBC Series Connections (subtitled An Alternative View of Change) is now available on YouTube (ten episodes each from 1978, 1994 and 1997). Burke was exploring the idea that innovation doesn’t occur in isolation, that creativity is a combinatorial force and depends on the interplay of unrelated events and motives. I like this stuff.
Until November 15 Digiarty is making their MacX Video Converter Pro a free download. The application is delivered as a mountable .DMG disk image file.
I haven’t tested this yet but I downloaded a copy to try it out next time I need to do some video conversion that Final Cut Express or MPEG Streamclip might not be able to handle. TUAW has a short review here.
Skype announced this morning an upgrade to their Mac client to accommodate group video calling (in beta). They’re offering a free trial right now for the group calling feature, but they say that one-to-one Skype video calling will remain free. Link to the 5.0 download for Mac is on the announcement page. The Windows version 5.0 beta came out earlier this year and it can be found here.
Some new features:
Group video calling
Integration with the Mac Address Book
New & improved (read: worse) user interface
Floating dial pad for calls and SMS
To do group video calling, everyone will need to be running Skype version 5.0 or later, either on Mac or Windows.
I haven’t tested this yet but plan to do so soon. Assuming the group calling rates aren’t ridiculously high, this could be a great teleconferencing solution.
Remember, it’s a beta so things might break. Caveat Skypor.
Today Vimeo announced Couch Mode for viewing full-screen videos on your TV.
The Vimeo blog post with more info can be found here. Couch Mode uses HTML5 and CSS3 technology (no Flash) so it can only be viewed currently on the Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers. (I’ve been using Chrome a lot lately, it’s a great browser.)
If you’re into digital photography and video — and you like to geek out a bit on the technical process, like I do — check out this little overview by Chase Jarvis and his team. They touch on workflow, processing, data management, and a little bit about how they take raw input from the field and work their creative output magic. It’s a really informative look at how some of the best digital creatives in the business perform their craft. His blog link to all this can be found here.
Below the video is a sketch of their digital workflow and backup methodology.
The outlook just got a lot rosier for the adoption of HTML5.
MPEG LA has announced that the h.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) video coding standard will remain royalty-free forever, as long as video encoded with the standard is free to end users. This means sites like YouTube and Vimeo will never be charged licensing fees to serve video on the web. It also means that a huge hurdle has been removed for companies who had concerns about moving away from Flash video to HTML5 and the h.264 video standard.
Up to now MPEG LA’s position on licensing had been that h.264 would be royalty-free through 2015; after that, who knows. So prior to today’s news it was possible that licensing fees would kick in within a few years, and it’s difficult to promote a standard with that kind of uncertainty around a key technology. The uncertainty is now gone.
I think HTML5 will be good for the web and mobility, so I’m glad to see this decision.
As a follow-up to a previous post about embedding Vimeo videos and having them work on Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), Vimeo just announced their Universal Player which will deliver the appropriate video format for the device being used. Vimeo’s FAQ page has more info on it, but the new method uses an <iframe> HTML tag to frame in the content, and the player will detect the device to serve the right video file. YouTube has recently rolled out something similar. Vimeo’s code looks like this (line breaks were added):
I did some quick testing and it worked fine. Both the iPad and iPhone were delivered h.264 versions, while Mac and PC still get the standard Flash player. I would like to see Vimeo offer some embed options to include serving straight HTML5/h.264 to the desktop as well and avoid Flash altogether.
WordPress doesn’t like the <iframe> tag, so if you’re using WP you will need to install the Embed Iframe plugin. In my testing this plugin has supported the new Vimeo method within a WP post. I have a test page here where I embed two videos, the first one using the new iframe code and the second one with the earlier javascript workaround.
