Charleston morning - iPhone

There have been a lot of incredible speakers at the 2010 NPPA Convergence in Charleston South Carolina. But the lessons continue after hours. I shot a quick video of Edit Foundry‘s Shawn Montano as he dove into a quick lesson on how to shoot Tony Overman (in a bikini) for a sequence while eating dinner at a restaurant in downtown Charleston. Great stuff so far and amazing people.

Most newspapers cannot afford having Final Cut Pro on every workstation, let alone one, so FCE has been the affordable answer.  That was, until the HD video DSLR’s started coming out then editing became quite the process dealing with raw video that needed to be rendered.

I don’t want to get into my frustrations and of those I know dealing with the raw HD video.  Instead, I’m posting my Streamclip export setting and how-to videos below.  I hope this helps anyone with problems getting their video into Final Cut Express, or is dealing with the “size vs quality” setting for online video export.

These are by no means authoritative, but based on using the tools to get work done at my paper.  Anyone with comments, questions or suggestions please post it below, thanks!

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Getting 7D video into Final Cut Express

Anyone with Final Cut Express and the new Canon DSLR cameras know the frustration of getting their video ready to edit.  Here are my settings, that I have set up as “preset” in Streamclip to export it out for FCE use.

Streamclip, export to Final Cut Express from 7D

I  know the 1440 is not 1920 but is, by my guess is, that FCE was designed to play nice with the many 1400×1080 HDV tape camcorders on the market.  The menu says it’s a 4:3 aspect ratio but when you put the converted clip into FCE it adjusts the workspace to a widescreen format.  Also, I have not ran into a noticeable quality problem using the 1440 size.

Watch the How-to: (if you cannot read the menus click here to go to the youtube file and enlarge it to full screen)

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H264 mov export for Web use:

There are so many recommendations on saving for Web that it can be very, very confusing.  I found no distinct output that gave me a small enough size for the quality so I fiddled around, and around, and around until I hit on this.  For short or long videos (that would be uploaded to Blip.tv, youtube or vimeo) I used this set of settings in Streamclip.  I hope it works for some of you.

Streamclip settings for HD for Web

Watch the How-to:  (if you cannot read the menus in the video click here to play it in a new windown and hit full-screen)

Free video chat by Ustream

Let’s just say it hasn’t been easy finding a way to upload to blip.tv from your iPhone, but thankfully the latest Pixelpipe update has given iPhone folks a way to do it. But it takes forever. Oh, well. At least I can get my videos from my phone into blip.tv without being at home or in the newsroom.

I have tried FTP apps, cross-post upload apps, etc. with no success, until tonight. Now from just about anywhere I can shoot video sequences though my iPhone, edit them in ReelDirector, upload them to blip.tv using Pixelpipe, then post the video embed code (from my blip.tv account) into my blog or my newspaper Web site.

I am no longer tethered to the youtube service and can publish my full resolution video where I want it.

The benefit to this is being able to ‘live video blog’ from the field with the best size video the iPhone can put out. ReelDirector is also a boon, because it allows for simple edits, basic transitions (if you need them) and title/credit text before pushing it out to the public. I cannot wait to try it out on something a bit more structured than this family video. Enjoy!

Learning at conferences or workshops are great opportunities, but oftentimes that concentrated learning fades away if it’s not practiced.  So I highly recommend to anyone who needs a reference to read these.  There are plenty of things to read, watch and learn online, but these I like to provide these to folks for additional layer of context than what can be remembered in a short conference/workshop setting.

Enjoy. (NOTE! I changed a few bits of code on my blog that was preventing some links from working by accident — including the ones below.  The links should work now, sorry for the inconvenience.)

FINAL CUT PRO TUTORIAL 2009 — Bruce Strong
Download the PDF

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR EDITING AUDIO — Mary McGuire
Download the PDF

INTERACTIVE BAG OF TRICKS: Multimedia Storytelling Options
Download the PDF

Bruce Strong at the 2009 NPPA Convergence talking about editing in Final Cut Pro.

I plan to post a few PDFs later from my computer on Monday that includes instruction on audio ethics, final cut editing and a reporters tool kit for shooting video.

(Photos below are from: 1 Biggs, early early early… on the way to Eugene. 2 A lamp on the campus of University of Oregon. 3 A panel talks tech in the newsroom at the SPJ conference.)

This clip is just over one minute long and took the iPhone four minutes to encode with transitions and title/credit text. Far faster than dumping it into my MacBook. The next update to the software is supposed to provide some audio editing/overlay control.

The old Boise Cascade mill in Yakima burns on Sept. 26, 2009. Image taken from video.

When on scene of this developing fire, I shot a very short video clip with my iPhone and sent it to youtube while shooting with the Canon XH-A1. I knew that I would not be able to cut through, encode and upload raw video as quick as I could send a clip through youtube so I tried it out. (both examples below) There’s a huge difference in quality, but also a huge difference in output time.

Do I think the youtube version got the message across when time was a factor? Yes. It clearly says ‘big darn fire’ or ‘Yakima burns’ to the public looking for information about what’s going on. Should it be replaced with something better? Absolutely. Once I had the raw video from the pro camera online, I notified the people who were using the youtube video and asked them to take it down.

So here they are.

YOUTUBE: iPhone with youtube upload from fire scene

YAKIMAHERALD.COM (Blip) with Canon XH-A1, cut, encoded from home on MacBook

My judgment?  I would do it again this way, however with a few differences.  I will use the yakimaherald youtube account next time.  (gotta get that programmed into my phone as an option) I will try to put more info into the cutline if possible with teaser info for the link for more into.  I could have but was more interested if it worked at all at the time.  Adding a disclaimer in the text teasing the ‘full’ or produced video at a later time so check back… sort of thing might have helped as well.  I may have more thoughts on this later.  Ta, ta.