Westercon Business Meeting Videos

[kevin_standlee]

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.

Comments

[billroper]

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!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I've got the full Adobe Premiere Pro setup here (and Media Encoder and all the related stuff), and the horsepower to drive it, so it looks a bit like a nail to me. You might find that stepping up to Sony Vegas or the enthusiast rather than PRO version of Premiere would give you a lot better results on pro file format conversions. (Vaguely $100 software, I'm not suggesting the $1000 or $30/month approach for what you're doing, clearly disproportionate expense.)

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.