Video Editing Experiences
OK, sure, I've used iMovie multiple times to put together YouTube videos or add together a few clips with fadeovers to a single movie to share within the family. Nothing complicated, and iMovie is great for that.
This summer, however, I agreed to film three different productions: a children's musical my kids both played in, the leaving-elementary-school musical my daughter played in and a play performed by the local junior acting group during our wine fest. I figured I could produce at least decent quality video with my Canon 60D, though I realized the built-in microphone would never cut the cake.
So I picked up a Røde SVM Pro and did some tests during the final practice session of the children's musical. Even with the excellent Røde mic, you run into some beams when you film using the 60D. For one thing, getting your levels right on the 60D with the regular firmware is really not easy, as you don't see the level meters while filming (why not, Canon - was it really that hard to program???). I did some research on the web and found Magic Lantern, an alternate firmware add-on for the 60D that gives you a lot of info on screen as you film. However, that add-on isn't flashed into the camera, it loads off the SD card every time the camera restarts. Which means once you swap SD cards with one that doesn't have the software on it, and you're SoL.
To make a long story short, I ended up reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of videos on different external recording devices and ended up buying the Tascam ___, which has a lot of nifty features and is made to be used in exactly such a setting. You screw your DSLR on top of the Tascam and it onto your tripod. Connect the Røde into channels 3+4 on the recorder and a stereo cable from the recorder DSLR audio output to the external mic jack on the 60D and you're all set to go.
One issue that even Magic Lantern doesn't fix is the 4GB recording limit on the 60D (or any other DSLR you care to use). Obviously so, as that limit, which gives you around 12 minutes of recording time, doesn't originate from some obscure law that doesn't permit longer recordings than 12 minutes on a DSLR (as some internet accounts will want you to believe) - the issue is that with all current DSLRs going by the DCF standard, the file system used for the 60D SD-Card is FAT32 (or some variant of that)! This damn format as been around since MS-DOS, folks! The problem is simple, of course: a standard Windows system (which, unfortunately, a good percentage of DSLR users are stuck with) can't read any modern file systems other than NTFS (which, in itself, is from the 90's). And FAT32 (or even ExFAT) simply can't deal with a file larger than 4GB.
So now there is an issue: after about 12 minutes, the camera recording just stops. There isn't an option to have it restart with a new file, either (in Magic Lantern, this can be selected). Not only would I have to be quite wary about the current recording to end, but also how would I fill the gaps between one recording and the next? Even if I cought the end of the recording immediately - or stopped it manually to restart, there would be a gap in the video of a couple of seconds. The need for a second camera became obvious. Keep vigilant to catch either the end of the recording time for a segment or stop it at an opportune moment and make sure the second camera was already running to make up for the missing material.
That sounds complicated, but with a bit of practice, it actually isn't that difficult. I ended up running up to three cameras at once: the 60D, my Fujifilm X100T and a (borrowed) Panasonic HD mini-camcorder. That plus the Tascam recording from the Røde Mic. In one recording session (the musical was performed four times), I even plugged into the AV mixer to record the direct wireless headset mikes onto tracks 1&2.
I used a similar setup with the other two events (sans the direct AV mixer input), leaving me with three projects to put together into one contiguous video each. And this is where things got really hard.
The version of iMovie I have on my laptop is the newest one from the App Store. And instead of making things better, Apple apparently really dumbed this software down. I have seen YouTube videos of people showing iMovie 11 doing multiple camera editing… something the current version isn't able to do. Why, Apple??? Oh, I get it - to sell more copies of Final Cut Pro, of course!
I started researching again. There are actually quite a lot of different video editing packages available for Mac computers - from very simple (and relatively inexpensive) products to professional software costing upwards of €800. Final Cut Pro runs €300, so it is actually "reasonable" in comparison. I tried a software called Filmora Video Editor, which permits editing with multiple camera streams and even multiple audio streams. Unfortunately, this software failed for me as it doesn't how the waveform in the audio streams (required to sync up audio and video), and because - for some reason - it produced runaway audio with the audio track (i.e. audio that runs just a fraction of a percent faster than the video and subsequently gets out of sync more and more… sorry, there is probably a pro term for this, but I don't know it).
I checked into some other editors, all in the 20-100€ range, but none cut the cake. Most of them didn't permit multiple camera streams to be added and switched between.
Next, I downloaded the trial version of Final Cut Pro - I was getting desperate. Multi-camera editing is possible in FCP - along with adding separate audio tracks - something which, of course, is quite common in the Video Maker space out there. After seeing this enlightening video, it seemed that FCP would be the ideal solution, as it even syncs up the different streams by the audio content (along with your audio content). Unfortunately, FCP is quite complex (even though I'm sure Apple has done everything to make it as simple to use as possible) and I wasn't able to get the syncing to work. And then, there is the price, of course.
I'd discovered - again via a YouTube video I'd come across by searching for multicam editing - ScreenFlow previously, but hadn't tested it yet. After the first fail in FCP, I decided to give it a shot, even though it seemed more a software to produce screen cam movies. Talk about being pleasantly surprised! I'll report on my success (or failure) with this software soon.
This summer, however, I agreed to film three different productions: a children's musical my kids both played in, the leaving-elementary-school musical my daughter played in and a play performed by the local junior acting group during our wine fest. I figured I could produce at least decent quality video with my Canon 60D, though I realized the built-in microphone would never cut the cake.
So I picked up a Røde SVM Pro and did some tests during the final practice session of the children's musical. Even with the excellent Røde mic, you run into some beams when you film using the 60D. For one thing, getting your levels right on the 60D with the regular firmware is really not easy, as you don't see the level meters while filming (why not, Canon - was it really that hard to program???). I did some research on the web and found Magic Lantern, an alternate firmware add-on for the 60D that gives you a lot of info on screen as you film. However, that add-on isn't flashed into the camera, it loads off the SD card every time the camera restarts. Which means once you swap SD cards with one that doesn't have the software on it, and you're SoL.
To make a long story short, I ended up reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of videos on different external recording devices and ended up buying the Tascam ___, which has a lot of nifty features and is made to be used in exactly such a setting. You screw your DSLR on top of the Tascam and it onto your tripod. Connect the Røde into channels 3+4 on the recorder and a stereo cable from the recorder DSLR audio output to the external mic jack on the 60D and you're all set to go.
One issue that even Magic Lantern doesn't fix is the 4GB recording limit on the 60D (or any other DSLR you care to use). Obviously so, as that limit, which gives you around 12 minutes of recording time, doesn't originate from some obscure law that doesn't permit longer recordings than 12 minutes on a DSLR (as some internet accounts will want you to believe) - the issue is that with all current DSLRs going by the DCF standard, the file system used for the 60D SD-Card is FAT32 (or some variant of that)! This damn format as been around since MS-DOS, folks! The problem is simple, of course: a standard Windows system (which, unfortunately, a good percentage of DSLR users are stuck with) can't read any modern file systems other than NTFS (which, in itself, is from the 90's). And FAT32 (or even ExFAT) simply can't deal with a file larger than 4GB.
So now there is an issue: after about 12 minutes, the camera recording just stops. There isn't an option to have it restart with a new file, either (in Magic Lantern, this can be selected). Not only would I have to be quite wary about the current recording to end, but also how would I fill the gaps between one recording and the next? Even if I cought the end of the recording immediately - or stopped it manually to restart, there would be a gap in the video of a couple of seconds. The need for a second camera became obvious. Keep vigilant to catch either the end of the recording time for a segment or stop it at an opportune moment and make sure the second camera was already running to make up for the missing material.
That sounds complicated, but with a bit of practice, it actually isn't that difficult. I ended up running up to three cameras at once: the 60D, my Fujifilm X100T and a (borrowed) Panasonic HD mini-camcorder. That plus the Tascam recording from the Røde Mic. In one recording session (the musical was performed four times), I even plugged into the AV mixer to record the direct wireless headset mikes onto tracks 1&2.
I used a similar setup with the other two events (sans the direct AV mixer input), leaving me with three projects to put together into one contiguous video each. And this is where things got really hard.
The version of iMovie I have on my laptop is the newest one from the App Store. And instead of making things better, Apple apparently really dumbed this software down. I have seen YouTube videos of people showing iMovie 11 doing multiple camera editing… something the current version isn't able to do. Why, Apple??? Oh, I get it - to sell more copies of Final Cut Pro, of course!
I started researching again. There are actually quite a lot of different video editing packages available for Mac computers - from very simple (and relatively inexpensive) products to professional software costing upwards of €800. Final Cut Pro runs €300, so it is actually "reasonable" in comparison. I tried a software called Filmora Video Editor, which permits editing with multiple camera streams and even multiple audio streams. Unfortunately, this software failed for me as it doesn't how the waveform in the audio streams (required to sync up audio and video), and because - for some reason - it produced runaway audio with the audio track (i.e. audio that runs just a fraction of a percent faster than the video and subsequently gets out of sync more and more… sorry, there is probably a pro term for this, but I don't know it).
I checked into some other editors, all in the 20-100€ range, but none cut the cake. Most of them didn't permit multiple camera streams to be added and switched between.
Next, I downloaded the trial version of Final Cut Pro - I was getting desperate. Multi-camera editing is possible in FCP - along with adding separate audio tracks - something which, of course, is quite common in the Video Maker space out there. After seeing this enlightening video, it seemed that FCP would be the ideal solution, as it even syncs up the different streams by the audio content (along with your audio content). Unfortunately, FCP is quite complex (even though I'm sure Apple has done everything to make it as simple to use as possible) and I wasn't able to get the syncing to work. And then, there is the price, of course.
I'd discovered - again via a YouTube video I'd come across by searching for multicam editing - ScreenFlow previously, but hadn't tested it yet. After the first fail in FCP, I decided to give it a shot, even though it seemed more a software to produce screen cam movies. Talk about being pleasantly surprised! I'll report on my success (or failure) with this software soon.
blog comments powered by Disqus