kevin_standlee: (Business Meeting)
kevin_standlee ([personal profile] kevin_standlee) wrote2015-07-21 07:07 pm

Editing the Business Meeting Video

At [livejournal.com profile] billroper's suggestion, I bought a copy of The WonderShare video editor. It's relatively inexpensive and has some, but not all, of the features I would like to have. For example, while it has the timeline (MovieMaker got rid of it to "simplify" the program), it doesn't allow you to tell a clip to fade out either in video or audio. The titling is also terrible IMO. It's flashy, but there's on way to tell it to center the titles or otherwise align them. Everything is by eyeball. I expect it was written by someone who never does anything with a keyboard, only with a mouse. However, it does read MXF files without garbling or degrading them, as long as you change the video file extensions to MPG and the audio files to MP3.

The Business Meeting Orientation video for which we shot video at Westercon is nearly done. All that needs doing is to record the narration for a section for which we shot video but no audio. Once that's done, I'll upload the video to YouTube and let people have a look.

My current plan is to have us show this video at 10 AM at the start of the Preliminary and First Main Business Meetings. We've typically let people have about ten minutes to wander in late anyway, so if we start the video at 10 sharp, we should be ready to start the meeting itself by 10:10. We have a lot of agenda and Programming really wants us to stay within the lines they've drawn for us (finish by 12:45 PM on Thursday-Saturday and 5:30 PM Sunday), so I'm feeling the time pressure. However, I also am thinking we're going to have a lot more first-time attendees this year, so I hope that eight minutes of basic instruction on the forms we follow (getting recognized, how voting works, the most common motions) will help them.
billroper: (Default)

[personal profile] billroper 2015-07-22 02:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, it's an imperfect piece of software, but it's in that "just good enough" area for this particular job. I'm happy that it's working out ok for you.

By the way, you don't actually have to change the extensions -- that just makes them show up in the default file views. If you change the filter to "All files" and select a file with an MXF extension, it tries to open it and goes "Oh! I know what to do with this." At least, that's what I found.
Edited 2015-07-22 14:58 (UTC)

[identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com 2015-07-22 03:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Ooh, thank you! That saves time, since there are lots of files, even accounting for the fact that I'm only using one of the two audio channels.

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2015-07-22 04:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, well, Adobe Premiere Pro is imperfect also. "Much cheaper" and "meets Kevin's needs" is not a bad set of attributes.