As you embark on your first journey to create a video montage for a wedding, bar, or bat mitzvah, Sweet 16s or Quinceañeras can at first seem like an exciting adventure, a journey west to new lands that seem open and welcoming. .
And then you come across those hostile terms.
4: 3; 16: 9; widescreen full screen; NTSC; COMRADE; dpi; fps; drop frame; frame without drop; High Definition; standard-definition; to import; to export; HDMI; RCA; S-Video; Component input / output; Mpeg4; Fast time; WAV, oh my!
Foreign words, numbers, and slang come flying at you in a way that will make your head spin!
Fortunately, this Thanksgiving, I’m here to help you make peace with foreign terms; help you sit around the video montage presentation table with abbreviations, numbers, and terms like friends, ready to fluently speak the tech talk. However, at least well enough to know how to pass the filling.
In this first part of the series, I’ll focus on getting you started and on your way to creating the montage itself, saving the discussion on editing, mastering, and projection for the ongoing tutorial series.
So roll up your sleeves and get your pencils or keyboards ready.
Regardless of the software you use to create your video montage presentation, one of the first things you may come across is the choice between NTSC or PAL. Here in the US, most systems will automatically set it to NTSC, with PAL being an option you can switch to. Whose. Unless you are creating this montage for someone in a country outside the United States to play, you want to stay on NTSC. This is the video system that was created here decades ago when television and the broadcast system were invented.
American engineers developed standards to make equipment compatible and have maintained these standards throughout the evolving film and video industry and its ever-improving product lines of cameras, television, broadcast equipment (cable, satellite), and software delivery systems like VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. Back then, Europeans followed the US, developing their television system in a similar way, slightly improving some of the standards, although the difference is relatively inconsequential. For example, instead of 24 frames per second (fps), their cameras run at 25 fps. The difference only serves to make the equipment incompatible, which you may have noticed if you traveled abroad and tried to play a DVD on a foreign DVD player. It doesn’t work, buddy!
The next option you are likely to find is to set your project to 4: 3 or 16: 9 or not. Your system may ask this question in another way as well, such as full screen or widescreen. In this case, 4: 3 and full screen are essentially interchangeable, and the same is true for 16: 9 and wide screen.
To explain this simply, 4: 3 / full screen will create your video montage project closer to a square shape, the kind of shape that older TVs have, while 16: 9 / wide screen will create your project in more than one rectangle. shape, the kind of shape for newer televisions where it’s wider, more similar to a movie screen.
Here’s the thing. For video montage presentations, either option is acceptable.
You may be thinking “Well I want to go 16: 9 just like my beautiful wide screen HDTV. I’m from the present, not the future, not stuck in the past with an old TV that has bunny ears sticking out.“
Well, wait a second, partner.
The best way to determine how you make your choice is based on the material you are using for mounting. Chances are, 4: 3 / full screen is a better choice for you most of the time, and I’ll tell you why. If you are working with historical video sequences that have been shot over the years, most or all of those images will have been created in 4: 3 / full screen. So if you set your project to widescreen, you’ll simply add those black bars to the sides or make the image stretch to fill the larger screen, which will make your wife look fatter, which she certainly won’t. help your relationship.
Basically the same applies to photographs. Most of the photos you’ll be working with for montage are closer to 4: 3 than 16: 9, although a bit of cropping will be required for either. However, cropping becomes more challenging for 16: 9 when a photo was taken in portrait style, that is, taller in the hand like a standing person, rather than wider. Photo frames often come ready to sit on the table in any way to suit the direction the camera was turned when you took the photo. For a montage, when it comes to portrait photography, if you want to see the whole picture, you will have plenty of black space on either side, and even more with 16: 9 than with 4: 3.
But if you are creating a montage that is primarily based on freshly shot video, captured with a high definition video camera, then the footage is likely to be either widescreen, or as I would correctly say, 16: 9 “natively. “. In this case, choose the widescreen for your aspect ratio, also known as the aspect ratio. Photos will be well cropped at this size, and with portrait shots you can either crop a 16: 9 section of the shot or deal with black bars.
Don’t worry, whatever format you choose, your montage will still work well on all televisions, projectors, and on the Internet. The shape will adjust in slightly different ways to suit how it is displayed.
This formatting problem leads us to your next choice. High definition or standard definition. Again, you may be thinking that you want to create your montage in high definition so that everyone can see how beautiful your family really is … every smile, wink, and dimple.
But the same questions still apply.
Is the source material you are working with high definition? This question is mainly focused on video footage, because photos can be high resolution and look stunning in high definition, assuming they were originally taken in high resolution with a digital camera, or scanned from a high resolution print, which in this case is known as dpi or dots per inch (the higher the number of dpi, the higher the resolution). If your video footage was not shot in high definition, but in standard definition (essentially good quality before high definition), it will not look better if you create your project in high definition. In fact, it could look worse if it is stretched to fill the widescreen format that high definition requires. Some televisions and DVD players are fully capable of high definition “rez”, but the reality is that the video image quality will never improve, it can only, at best, maintain that quality when expanded to a larger size. .
The other downside to editing your montage in high definition is that it will require more memory and a faster, stronger computer to process the data while you are working. In fact, this can slow down the editing process and lead to a higher level of frustration. How new is your computer and how fast is the processor?
So if your video is standard definition, it probably makes more sense to create your montage in “standard definition”. When later in this series of articles you cover the screening of your montage at a live event, this same discussion will have its final conclusion in the form of projection that best suits how the montage was created, in terms of aspect ratio and high definition / def. standard Suffice it to say that if you are projecting your montage from a standard DVD, it can’t be high definition anyway.
And if you plan to upload the montage for viewing on YouTube, once again, the standard definition will be of high enough quality, and in fact, the rezz will most likely be reduced from there! Once you go HD, you have to go all the way to the finished product and presentation to enjoy the benefits; otherwise, you will waste your time worrying about high definition for nothing! Remember, even if you are making a simple photo montage without video footage, you have to think about the end game that is projecting this at your event, and the project needs to be set up appropriately depending on how it will be displayed.
Your editing system can also give you a choice of audio settings. Some do, some don’t. If you need to choose between non-deleted frames and deleted frames (which affects both video and audio), select the deleted frame, as this is probably the best option for most video applications that do not require you to work with footage. . on real film, i.e. 35mm or 16mm motion picture film. The other audio configuration options can be between 48K or 32K, 16-bit or 12-bit. All are acceptable, however given the options I would recommend going for 48K and 16bit. Rather than give a technical explanation on this, I suggest you nod your head and take my advice. In more home-based non-professional systems (which may work well for your purposes), these options may not even crop up.
Your project is already set up, most likely you are working in NTSC and you have chosen 4: 3 / full frame or 16: 9 / wide screen and you are ready to start creating your montage. However, before you start channeling your inner Steven Spielberg, you must first incorporate the material into your project. That is, still photos and video footage, and in most systems this will be a variation of the term “import.” A common thread for video import is the ability of most video cameras to connect directly to your computer via a Firewire cable, allowing direct import of video footage into your project.
If the footage was created digitally, then a conversion of the digital files to the format required for your editing system will also be an import function. Each system will have its slightly unique way of doing this, with PC systems and Mac-based software tackling this in its own way, and unfortunately this series would become unwieldy to explain all the different programs out there and the different settings for. get your stuff. loaded and / or accessible.
So like following a Julia Childs cooking show, you will have to go get all your ingredients and put them on your table, and then in the next part of this series, you are ready to start learning how to cook your souffle, be it a photo montage type only, or a montage that combines photos and video.
Happy Thanksgiving and happy montage!
Stay tuned for the video montage tech talk tutorial, part 2 …