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)

The photo is of Andy Bronson. We had a ton of fun following state basketball.

Today was a day about as varied as any I have had at the YH-R.  Thankfully it involved most of my day inside because it was coooooold today.  My photo day pretty much went from shooting a convicted sex offender at his place of residence to a portrait (and video) of a Christmas light fanatic outside in the snow with his lights going crazy. The full day walk-through is below the photos.

This photo of one of the Tourist Motel residents and his cat will not run in tomorrow's paper, but it is one of my favorite of the day.

The final shot of the day, froze my and reporter Pat Muir's collective butts off in the snow waiting for the lights to animate just right with the background music of the "Transiberian Christmas" song... I had about a quarter inch of snow on my head when it was all finished.

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Once I got in, went through the 20 odd e-mails from people letting us know about their crazy Christmas lighted house, then added them to our google map for the public.

Went to the morning budget meeting, found out that a news story about a particular “motel” in town had probably closed leaving residents out in the cold.  It’s a pretty big story considering this was essentially a follow-up story that we broke about the place being riddled with code violations and another knowing we were greatly limited for art because no one from the property wanted to be on camera.

So I headed off armed with the shop 400 2.8 and my kits to the motel, was lucky enough to catch officials talking about the closure of one building, not the whole thing, as we first believed.  Moved on to ask said code enforcers what happened, interviewed him with my iPhone, then met up with the reporter to talk to managers and residents about the relocation of people to other vacancies at the motel.

The residents varied from mothers with young children, immigrants from as far away as India and of course an unintentional shot of a multiple child sex offender.  That’s where the photo comes in at top.  He wasn’t being moved, but was part of the color I saw living all around this motel.  I didn’t think of asking ‘are you by chance a sex offender’ while I asked questions, but after returning to the office our cops reporter recognized the name and so this photo now becomes part of the Web gallery.

Continued plugging along after getting the photos and gallery set on that assignment to work on Web work, iPhone app testing (for our YH-R beta test app) and getting packed up to shoot a night portrait of one of the crazy Christmas light setups in the community.

The assignment had a narrow work window because the guy who set this music animated house up was only around for a couple hours this week.  So a night shot was in, the house was in full glory and the music blared Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” and music from the Transiberian Orchestra.  The only thing… it was cooold and snowing, a lot.

So much for the big stobes. Go to the backup equipment and the gaffer tape.  After the interview, I had our intrepid reporter Pat, hold an extended light stand with one of my flashes mounted on it with cardboard gaffer taped around the end to give it a spotlight effect from above.  Then I put the camera on a tripod and handheld another flash with a softbox on it for fill.  After I got the one shot I was confident was in focus (because of the pitch black without the flash and the snow foiling with the AF) and with the house lit up in the most complete manner, I put the still equipment away and pulled out the video stuff.  I went ahead and shot the house musically going through “Blue Christmas” about four times from different angles then put it away to shoot secondary stills — inside.  Overall, I’m OK with the outdoor portrait, but the snow was coming down and our willing victims were freezing.  Ultimately it was a challenging situation that I made it through but know I will do differently next time. (Once I do the video I will post it here)

Now that I’m home and warmer, I can say that it was a strange day where the weather changed dramatically in a short amount of time, the subjects were all over the map and I was able to adapt to the environment at hand.  If only I had more time in the day…

-TJ

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.