Digital Video - What you need to know

What is digital video?

Digital video is still an emerging phenomenon, leading the way in new and inventive ways of presenting news, information and entertainment to people via television or the internet.

Before digital video, people used the much antiquated analog video. This uses analog waves to form pictures; VHS is an example of an analog video format, analog video only captures still images and then the video player would read the images on too magnetic mediums.  Unfortunately analog video degrades over time, so the picture quality will be reduced; this does not happen with digital. Also it is a lot cheaper to record on digital video than to buy 35mm film. However analog video does have some advantages, since digital video is susceptible to viruses or crashing, so most industries back up their digital videos onto analog due its reliability.

When it comes to editing videos digital wins again, analog editing requires cutting the tape, sellotaping it back together and is linear, you can’t go back and cut another frame out until it has played through, this is a very delicate and time consuming process. Digital editing on the other hand can be stopped and modified at will, with frames being cut out, moved or made faster with the touch of but a few buttons.

Digital videos must be transferred to a computer to perform editing; this can be done by attaching a FireWire lead to the device to upload it, FireWire is predominately used because it has the highest upload rate, in comparison to the USB 2.0 at 480Mbit/s making it a more optimal interface standard compared to USB.

Digital video can come in different formats, the main format for digital videos is MPEG’s, MPEG-4 is fairly common, used in the distribution of large videos over the internet. And MPEG-2 used for DVDs.

How we used Adobe Premiere.

For our first assignment we went to the B-side multimedia arts festival in Weymouth and Portland to film them a few days before the event began, to record interviews with the artists who were appearing that year and of them setting up their artwork to give people a taste of what was on offer. After we had a good half a day’s worth of footage we began loading it onto the college computers and editing it in Adobe Premiere, first of all I had to import the video from my hard-drive after that I could begin. I began by Unlinking the sound from the video, you can do this by right clicking on the video which is in the timeline at the bottom of the screen and clicking “unlink”, this was mainly because we didn’t have a wind protector to negate the sounds of the wind hitting the microphone, and so it was decided early on that we would have background music over the video.

Once I had the video on the timeline I played the footage, placing a marker at time intervals I believed could be cut, that allowed us to go back and easily differentiate which parts I needed to keep and which parts were getting the chop. The music picked for our video was fast-paced and a little whacky so the editing needed to be able to reflect this, too get the right look for the camera travelling fast paced around Portland we sped the speed of the video to 2000% this made it a fast moving blur that went well with the music. To export a video you first highlight it from the timeline, and then click “export” via the file menu, from there you can choose to export it as a .PPJ file which was what we did, so it didn’t take up as much memory, alternatively you can export it as an AVI file, making it of greater quality but meaning the file size would be much larger, you can do this by following; File > Export > Movie.

What is YouTube and how do I upload a video?

YouTube is an internet video-sharing site that was conceived in 2005, it allows users to upload and view videos from all over the world, and has grown ever since into a household name. In May 2010 it was reported that YouTube was serving more than 2 billion videos a day, cementing its place as the world’s most popular video sharing website.

It accepts many formats of videos when you upload them to the site, the Google help information states that it accepts:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (typically supporting h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)

·         .AVI (Many cameras output this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)

·         .MPEGPS (Typically supporting MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)

·         .WMV

·         .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

 Uploading videos onto YouTube is a relatively simple process, which is probably a reason why it is so popular as pretty much everyone can access the site and share their videos. To upload a video you first click on the link at the top of the website called “Upload” conveniently, you are moved to a webpage where you can either upload an existing video or record one on a web cam. If you click on “upload video” you will be directed to your files and can select the video you wanted uploaded, the selected video will then take some time to upload onto the website, then you are able to give the video a title and description and it’s done. Videos must be under 2GB in size and 15 minutes in duration.