A short and very abbreviated list of some of the notes I took at a one-night class for Digital Video Editing. I kept referring to it as an outline for most video-editing projects, so posting it here.
• DV Captures at 720 x 480 (rectangular)
• Computers display square pixels / TVs display rectangular pixels.
• You need to change video from 720 x 480, to 640 x 480. (this doesn’t change the resolution, just makes the pixels square).
• Apple has it’s own implementation of both H.264 AND MPEG 4 (get to it by exporting “Movie to QuickTime”, rather than the first codec popups you see).
• Select “None” for RAW video
• 2 different ways to compress video:
a) Temporal (between keyframes, i.e., from frame to frame to frame…)
b) Spacial (IN each frame, i.e. looks at all the pixels in each frame to determine the best way to compress it).
• H.264 — NEVER go below “Medium” quality.
• When possible, use a manual bit-rate (data rate)… rather than a “variable” bit-rate.
• When compressing for iPod video, do not exceed 2400 KBPS (ideally, use manual bit-rate of 2100, allowing for audio’s bit-rate; however… if using H.264 as compressor, use data-rate value of 768.
• Use “Compression” – by Ben Wagner, for pretty intuitive GUI for on the fly compression.
