kevin_standlee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kevin_standlee) wrote2015-07-10 01:20 pm
kevin_standlee) wrote2015-07-10 01:20 pm
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Westercon Business Meeting Videos
The Westercon Business Meeting was just over twelve minutes long this year, including site selection results and the initial adoption of a motion to lower the meeting's quorum from 15 to 10 members. This made the video a good test-bed for the different file types and resolution rates in MovieMaker. Accordingly, here are three different versions of the video, in increasing order of quality.
This is the "quick-and-dirty" MP4 that the proxy card generates directly in the camera. The video is relatively small, so if you full-screen it, you'll see the degradation in the video quality.
This is almost certainly the quality/size you can expect to see of the WSFS Business Meeting videos as we upload them as fast as we can get them off of the camera at Spokane.
Converting the native MXF files to medium-resolution video and combining the video and audio results in this file. It takes a double conversion, because MovieMaker doesn't like the converted MXF files very much. You have to first import the converted files into MovieMaker, use that to make a WMF file, then start a new MovieMaker project with the WMF file as the input; you can then add the titles and credits. This also lets you bring in the second audio channel, which is the camera's onboard microphone. That lets you get a little bit more of the audience sound, instead of being completely dependent upon what came through the head-table microphones. But it's slow. Call it more than an hour of futzing around to do a 12-minute video, not including the upload time. The file itself is about 28 MB.
This is the higher-definition (2.1 mbps) version of the file, which runs the file size up to 186 MB. The video quality is much better, but it roughly triples the amount of time it takes to make the video in the first place. Whether we are ever able to edit together a full-length, higher-quality video from this material is doubtful, as it would probably take days just to generate the files.
There is at least one higher-quality setting in MovieMaker, but that predicts a 2.5 GB file for a mere twelve minutes of video, which seems a little extreme to me.
Lisa is still unhappy with the results, because she's not been able to get the camera's back-focus just right, and because this is a pro-grade camera, it tends to be far less forgiving of tiny errors.
Note that the sound is excellent on all three versions and is not significantly affected by the video resolution. That's crucial. We want people to be able to hear what's going on.
ETA: If you feel ambitious about doing the conversion/editing yourself, I've put a link to the raw files in a comment to this post. Be sure to read the warning about the file extensions.
This is the "quick-and-dirty" MP4 that the proxy card generates directly in the camera. The video is relatively small, so if you full-screen it, you'll see the degradation in the video quality.
This is almost certainly the quality/size you can expect to see of the WSFS Business Meeting videos as we upload them as fast as we can get them off of the camera at Spokane.
Converting the native MXF files to medium-resolution video and combining the video and audio results in this file. It takes a double conversion, because MovieMaker doesn't like the converted MXF files very much. You have to first import the converted files into MovieMaker, use that to make a WMF file, then start a new MovieMaker project with the WMF file as the input; you can then add the titles and credits. This also lets you bring in the second audio channel, which is the camera's onboard microphone. That lets you get a little bit more of the audience sound, instead of being completely dependent upon what came through the head-table microphones. But it's slow. Call it more than an hour of futzing around to do a 12-minute video, not including the upload time. The file itself is about 28 MB.
This is the higher-definition (2.1 mbps) version of the file, which runs the file size up to 186 MB. The video quality is much better, but it roughly triples the amount of time it takes to make the video in the first place. Whether we are ever able to edit together a full-length, higher-quality video from this material is doubtful, as it would probably take days just to generate the files.
There is at least one higher-quality setting in MovieMaker, but that predicts a 2.5 GB file for a mere twelve minutes of video, which seems a little extreme to me.
Lisa is still unhappy with the results, because she's not been able to get the camera's back-focus just right, and because this is a pro-grade camera, it tends to be far less forgiving of tiny errors.
Note that the sound is excellent on all three versions and is not significantly affected by the video resolution. That's crucial. We want people to be able to hear what's going on.
ETA: If you feel ambitious about doing the conversion/editing yourself, I've put a link to the raw files in a comment to this post. Be sure to read the warning about the file extensions.
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I apologize. I feel like I'm being a PITB, but I know that you and Lisa are putting a lot of effort into this and I'd like you to get the best possible results.
Thanks!
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Video (00010E.MPG)
Audio (00010E01.MP3)
Both of these files are actually MXF files. With the right codec, MovieMaker can read them directly. Rename them to .MXF if that's how your program needs to look at them.
The Audio file is the primary audio channel. I didn't bother uploading the inboard microphone channel; there's very little sound on it other than some bits of applause here and there.
There's a bit more than five seconds of no sound at the beginning. (Lisa asked me to hold off for a few seconds after the red light went on, and it turned out to be handy for putting the opening title over the edited version..)
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The audio and video that you uploaded actually appeared to be in sync, so I didn't adjust it. If I was wrong, well... :)
It took about 14 minutes to process this and 7 minutes to upload it on my rather elderly 32-bit OS quad core machine. The video processing actually appeared to be using two of the four cores from what I saw in Task Manager.
Link is here.
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Note that although this software won't allow to select an MXF file by default, if you pick one anyway (by looking at "All files") it then looks through the wrapper and finds the tasty video and audio inside. :)
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At what resolution did you save your copy? I'm saving the one I'm making with the evaluation copy at 1280*720, it's been running now for about 30 minutes, and it's only half finished. It predicts that the final file will be 402 MB. The computer is an older single-core machine, and it's running full tilt to generate the file, which may have a lot to do with it.
I'm not thrilled with its titling (you seem to have to place the titles by hand; you can't just say "center this on screen" or something like that), but unlike MovieMaker, it does actually work rather than abruptly shut down due to codec incompatibility.
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The other thing I notice from your post (in the light of day) is that it looks like you're doing a format conversion from 4x3 to 16x9, based on the resolution that you quote. Anything that involves a format conversion almost always takes longer and eats more CPU power than something that runs effectively pixel for pixel.
This sample seems to be at lower resolution than the original test clip that Lisa shot. If I recall correctly, she's shooting at lower res now to try to accommodate the proxy card in the camera. Is that the case?
Good luck!
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Lisa is indeed shooting at a lower resolution because it seems to make the MP4 that feeds into the SD card (via the proxy card) come out better. We're going to buy a faster SD card today if we can find one and see if this makes a difference. We have a theory that the speed of the SD card has been one of the limits on how good the MP4 comes out; that is, if the card can't accept the data fast enough, it gets a worse file. The camera also stores a copy of what should be the same MP4 on the P2 card itself, so we should be able to do some side by side comparisons.
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The extra cores appear to be a good thing.
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On the focus issue: is the basic issue a faster (and perhaps longer) lens, which gives less depth of field and hence requires greater focusing accuracy? Physics is not always your friend (pretty much *never* when optics is in question). If it's that, yeah, no quick easy fix, the only solution is better technique.
I haven't looked and listened to the tests yet, but it sounds like your *primary* goal, better sound, has been achieved. I have always been in strong agreement that that is the *right* goal from where you started working on this, so this is excellent.
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Did download and play with the files; indeed Premiere Pro eats it happily (with the names changed back to .mxf). Rendering the entire thing to an .avi file that Windows Media Player is happy with took about 7 seconds. The file is 2.6GB, so for some purposes one might want lower quality; I picked a default CODEC setting that I knew Windows would play, rather than one I know to be small.
(Downloading the files took almost two minutes; dunno if you've seen me ranting about prep for the Internet upgrade for the last two months, but we now eat big files for lunch, we're on a gigabit fiber connection. Even scarier, the upload is just as fast by contract and consistently faster by test.)
This is only the second video I've played with on this new box speced to be a video editing workstation. (That great render time was based on an old crufty graphics card, though; the new one arrived defective and has to be returned. So it should get faster, since rendering uses the GPU where possible.)
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*groan* *envy*
Maybe I will need to spring for a one-month license on Premier Pro when I'm ready to edit together a full version of the Meeting.
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I don't of course know how much of the difference is the software, and how much is the hardware. The new hardware is 6-core Intel i7 @ 3.3GHz, with 32GB of ram. (And a decent graphics card when the dead one gets replaced; currently an NVIDIA Geforce GT630 that I pulled out of the old system I'm decommissioning). If Premiere Elements will handle the input formats it will certainly handle everything else you need for this, and it costs about $80 at Amazon. Sony Vegas has a similar consumer version, that worked well for me until I got involved in things like cutting 8-camera live concerts, and is at a similar price point. Look there before diving into the deep end (unless you just *want* to dive in the deep end!).
What post-processing do you require before posting the good versions? Making sure the separate sound syncs, cutting the start and end points, and some basic titles? I'm not going to Sasquan, so I might be able to handle that end this year from home; feel free to email me if you want to discuss what and how to do that ( dd-b 'at' the same 'dot' net). Kick the problem down the road a year at least (and I'm planning to be at MacII so some other solution then would be needed). We've already verified that getting and editing the files is easy on my end.
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(This doesn't always work with cheap still-photo zooms, which are not computed to hold focus as they zoom, but anything on a decent video camera should work this way.)
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She also says that
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