Bill,

I just completed a "highlights" video of my son's high school football season. I made it specifically for me. If you try to create a special version for every other player on the team, you'll go nuts trying to keep track of everything. You could, however, limit your work to producing two highlights -- one for just you, and another encompassing all the big plays regardless of who made them. This approach is very doable.

You first need to have a goal in mind before doing any editing. In other words, are you going to save just you child's big plays, all big plays, etc.? I will tell you that it is better to be generous with the amount of video you keep, because it's much easier to keep trimming down instead of going back to the original footage and picking something up that you have second thoughts about including.

Here's how I do it: Work with each game tape separately. Edit the entire game by going through it from start to finish. Keep the scenes you want or think you want. Again, to be on the safe side, be generous with what you keep, you can always fine-tune later. Then, render the edited video to a new DV .AVI file. I give it a file name, like 'Game 1_Highlights'. You can then delete the "complete" game original footage from your hard drive. If you have enough hard drive space for ALL of the rendered "highlight" videos, that's great -- keep them on the hard drive. (At only 2 to 3 minutes per game, these files will be very small -- only about 500 - 600 MB.) If your really pressed for space, you can write the "highlight" version back to tape on your DV camcorder. (This is a good thing to do anyway in case your system crashes. DV tape is the cheapest backup medium there is for video work.) Repeat the above procedure for each game. After you've gone through editing all of the games and creating separate "highlight" videos, create a new VF project in which you work with all of these "highlight" videos. With this "entire season" project, you can do further fine-tuning, especially getting the total time to where you want it to be, and adding any transitions between games, titles, special effects, music (this is especially fun to add), etc. Once you get the "entire season" project where you want it, render the project to a single DV .AVI file. I name it something like, 'Entire Season_Highlights'.

I always write the final season highlight video back to DV tape for permanent storage. This gives you the opportunity to always go back and read it into VF and do further editing.

It is also a great way to make VHS copies for everyone. Simply put the DV tape in your camcorder, connect it to the VCR with a cable that should have come with the camcorder, press the REC button on the VCR, and then the play button on the camcorder. You get a great VHS copy everytime and you don't need the computer.

Personally, if I invest the amount of time that it takes to do something like an entire season highlight tape correctly, there is absolutely no way I'm junking it up by putting it on VCD or even SVCD. It goes only on DVD or VHS (VHS tape are much better than VCD especially for soccer game where there's so much motion.) I had about a 50/50 split of people who wanted it on DVD versus VHS tape.

I use Ulead DVD Movie Factory to author the DVDs. With DVD, you can create menus and/or chapter points that makes it easy to go directly to a particular game or great play.

I hope the above helps. Good luck with your video editing adventure. I know I got a lot of good comments from the people I gave tapes to. When I told them the program I use to do all the editing is only $60, they couldn't believe it. They thought I had thousands of dollars invested.

Ralph

>(VHS tape are much better than VCD especially for soccer game where there's so much motion.)

Interesting! I guess VCR and DVD player quality/compatibility may be an issue, but my results have been the opposite of that. I guess you have to see what works best for you.

Ian G.

Ian,

I have never had any VCD look decent when played back on my DVD player connected to my TV or the DVD player on my computer. They're always very blocky and pixelated looking. Yet, I've seen others like yourself state how good they are. What are you doing that I'm missing? Are you using special encoding software or the standard encoder that comes with VF? I would love to use VCD if the quality was anywhere near acceptable, but my experience has been that it's not even close.

I would really appreciate any insight.

Ralph.

I agree with Ralph. VCD is acceptable but it is half resolution. VHS is full frame full resolution. It will look better with movement.

The advantage of VCD though is you can make copies without anymore quality loss, whereas, as we all know, vhs will lose very quickly.

Dave T2

If your prime interest is saving disk space then in my opinion the only way to do it is during the capturing process.
Preview the original takes and capture only the highlites you are interested in. You can always go back to capture and add (insert)some more scenes in order to fill the 60 minutes.

I agree with PaulT1....

I use my camcorder to watch each tape and note start and end time for clips I want to keep. I then capture only those clips and name them carefully for later editing.

It's great to have some idea about the strucuture of the highlite film. The last one I did used "defense" "special teams" "bloopers" "offense" and "scenes". My labeling scheme included D, ST, B, O, and S for each captured clip. Each section was a separate project and movie. I stored them all back to back on DV tape...and took the tape to a copy shop to make VHS copies for everyone. As others have said, the players and their families LOVED their tapes.


Although it is a good idea to capture more than you know you will use...I have to force myself to KEEP IT SHORT. I aim for 30 minutes or less.

Ralph, no, I'm not doing anything special*. I use Nero to convert to MPEG-1 on the fly, and TMPGEnc to produce MPEG-2. I've tried using quite expensive CD-Rs and very cheap ones, but haven't seen any difference. By contrast, I've found the quality of VHS tapes has a clear effect - new tapes are very much better.

For a while, before it finaly turned its toes up, my old DVD player gave very poor results with home made VCDs, although it was fine with commercial ones and DVDs. My new one (very cheap, from the local supermarket) gives great results with everything! That said, I've just noticed you're also getting poor results on your PC, so it probably isn't the player.

* I may be doing something special(ish). I always turn off the buffer under-run protection and write at a low speed. I started doing this when I was having my own VCD problems and the habit's stuck.

Ian G.