Video Production Workflow
What goes into making your DVD?
OK, we've discussed and agreed the style of shoot, selected the shots we need, set up the lighting, camera and microphones, shot your video, captured great audio, and now we're ready to transfer the video to our editing systems and start editing. Let's take a high-level look at the process and define some key terms and concepts. That way, you'll be ready when the talk starts getting technical.
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Capturing— This is the process of transferring video from camera to computer. The video camera is connected to an editing computer and the tape is played back at normal speed and converted to digital computer files for editing. If we filmed for 3 hours, it takes 3 hours to download, and during the editing process we will select the bits we want to use. When using HD cameras, the files are transferred from the camera to dedicated hard drives. Further, file transfers to any other format, such as ISO, wmv, etc. is a very time consuming process. For example, transferring a 15 minute clip to an ISO can take 4 hours.
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Visual Editing— Visual Editing is the process of preparing captured video for viewing. This phase is crucial, as the choices, positioning, and length of time of each segment can enhance your image/presentation, or take away from it. A specialty of producer Zoe Vandermeer, she makes sure that your final product captures the essence of what you, your event or your business are about. Typically, this involves cutting away extraneous footage, reordering sequences, and adding titles and transitions. This also involves piecing the various clips into a watchable whole.
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Audio Editing - This is the process of taking your high quality audio recording and copying it onto the video audio tracks, replacing the original audio recorded by the video camera. A camera can never capture sound with the same quality as our sound engineer on pro-sound equipment so we combine the two giving you the best of both worlds - audio and visual on your DVD and web files.
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Authoring— Authoring is a key step in creating DVDs—the step that distinguishes DVDs from other just-the-movie media. It's the process of creating menus, linking them to content such as video and slideshows, encoding the video (see below), and recording the result to a DVD recorder. Though you can burn any video file to a DVD using a variety of software programs, unless you use a dedicated authoring program, the disc will not play on a consumer DVD player.
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Rendering— When the editing is done, the editor creates a new file (working from the captured videos and your various edit instructions), and encodes it into the format for playing on DVD players, computers, and files for internet playback. This final process, which encompasses not just format encoding but processing effects, is called rendering.
How Much Video Can I Fit on My DVD?
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As much as you want to, within a few basic parameters.
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Video is a scalable technology, which means you can compress to any desired size. For example, to fit one hour of video on a DVD, we can encode at high quality 8 Megabits per second (Mbps); to fit 2 hours, we can encode at 4Mbps; or to fit 4 hours, at 2Mbps. Unfortunately the video quality drops and starts to look pretty awful below 4 to 5Mbps. For this reason we recommend up to 90 mins per DVD to retain high quality.