how would you organize this project?

slambubba wrote on 7/28/2003, 11:21 PM

i have 3 1-hour tapes from a vacation. i don't know if it will be under 2 hours after editing or not. my final output will be on DVD using DVDA. how would you go about doing this project?

A. one project per tape
B. one project for all 3 tapes
C. ???

also, if i render using the default settings for a NTSC DVD, will that give me 2 hours of video on a 4.7GB DVD?

thanks.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 7/28/2003, 11:49 PM

For this kind of project I'll assume you going to do pretty heavy editing. I'd do it a tape at a time, meaning do a rough edit on tape one before you bring in tape two and so on, but keep as one large project. Once you have it all edted, then do a final edit on the whole thing AFTER you leave it alone TOTALLY for at least a few days. Amazing how critical you can be of your own work, looking at it the second time a week or so later.

Once you're happy with the editing it probably will be down to and hour or so. Bring into DV D-A add your chapter points there. By keeping it a single large file it will play all the way through as a DVD but you still can set chapter points based on how you edited the video. So you may go the what you did on Monday, what you did on Tueday route for chapters or edit by activity or something else all together.

At best you'll get around an hour and a half on a DVD using the default settings of DVDA. If you want a longer project, make two DVD's. In the long run you'll be happier than resorting to a lower bitrate to squeeze it all on a single DVD. Of course it depends on the quailty of the source video. If it isn't that good then experiment with a lower bitrate. Its just that if you have high quality source, chances are you won't be happy if you drop the bitrate way down just to get it on a single DVD.

If you're going to be showing the finished product to friends, family, consider making a out take section of some of you bad shots strung together. They probably will enjoy the bloopers... especially if you're one of those guys that forces relatives to watch two hour vaction videos. <wink>

Erk wrote on 7/29/2003, 11:11 AM

Thus spake BillyBoy:

"Once you have it all edted, then do a final edit on the whole thing AFTER you leave it alone TOTALLY for at least a few days. Amazing how critical you can be of your own work, looking at it the second time a week or so later."

Big dittos there. I've been doing audio mixing much longer than video editing, so I'm usually more critical of my music mixes. Amazing how I'll listen to a mix the next day and think "well, I'll fix this bit here and there" but if I give it a week or so, I see/hear some real glaring problems. Bad for us perfectionists. Hard to settle on a final mix.

G

slambubba wrote on 7/29/2003, 2:14 PM

thanks for the advice. what exactly do you mean by "then bring in tape two"? i have all the video already captured and in separate media bins. would that work or should i only have one tape in the media pool at a time?

BillyBoy wrote on 7/29/2003, 2:51 PM

I was assuming you had various DV tapes from your camera, thus tape 1, 2, 3, etc..
If you already got it all in your computer, kewl.