kevin_standlee | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Would you like me to take a run at this with the Wondershare software I've got using the raw MXF files and your audio track and see what the results are like? It ran much faster than it seems that what you're doing does from your description (note that I'm on an old quad-core machine, but the Wondershare stuff only uses one core). The limitation is that it only allows for one audio track, so you'd have to pre-merge the audio tracks using a different bit of software.

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!

If you have the stomach for the large downloads, you're welcome to try. I've put the files on Google Drive. The video file is 2.5 GB.

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..)

Ok, it's uploaded to YouTube and they're processing it, so it should be available soon and you can check the results.

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.

That's pretty good; comparable to the higher-definition file I did, and it took less time than MovieMaker. I will see if I can get it to install on my machine. Thank you!

No problem. Happy to be able to help!

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. :)

So if you change the extensions to MPG and MP3 as I did, it seems to be able to digest the files.

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.

I actually converted and uploaded directly to YouTube in a single export operation. It said it was doing 720p and I picked 4x3 screen size.

In my experience with the earlier clip, I didn't even have to change the extension. Once I used "All files" to select the unknown extension files, the software looked through the wrapper and knew what to do with them.

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!

I didn't originally meant to change it to 16x9 (the original, as you noted, is 4x3), so I picked one of the 4x3 formats, and a smaller one. The resultant file wasn't appreciably smaller. I don't know how long it took to run because by then it was nearly midnight and I went to bed.

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.

I did a 4x3 at a lower resolution saved to the disk (720x568, I think) and it converted in substantially less than real time. It was about 320 MB.

The extra cores appear to be a good thing.

Westercon Business Meeting Videos

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