The Complete Amateur's Guide to Pro Video on the PowerBook by Remy Davison Good evening and welcome to the second instalment in the irregular 'Complete Amateur' series. This is the second one, so I guess it constitutes a series now. Last year, we looked at Pro Audio packages on the PowerBook. Now that FireWire's standard on every single Mac you can buy, I think it's safe to say that desktop video is now within reach of virtually everyone who's got a new Mac. And just to make things clear from the outset, we're not going to be looking at any cheap, fuzzy webcams, okay? No, I'm not telling you to rush out, sell your first-born and buy a $1,000-$2,000 Digital Video (DV) cam to complement that $899 iMac. Instead, go rent one. Or, borrow one from work on the weekend to...uh...work on delivering that presentation you've gotta give at the marketing meeting next week? Just don't forget to erase the evidence of your trip to Disneyland (unless you work in marketing at Disneyland, of course). For a mere $899, you can invest in a base iMac which has everything you need to produce DV: FireWire and iMovie 2.0. Sub-$1,000 DV cameras are now appearing. So for much less than the price of a Titanium PowerBook 400, you can do desktop videos. For $1,499, you can do the same thing, only mobile, with the iBook. Of course, you're going to need storage. Lots of storage. Think 30 or 40GB minimum. DV chews up about 210MB per minute (or more). Here, FireWire comes to the rescue, as cheap FireWire drives and kits abound everywhere now. For the low-down on FireWire hard drives, check out this Insanely-Great Mac article. If your G3 PowerBook doesn't have built-in FireWire, add a CardBus adapter from VST or Ratoc for example. For DV capture, a 300MHz or faster CPU is recommended. Bargain Basement For the Completely Broke Complete Amateur, there are a few freeware and shareware, as well as cheap-commercialware, alternatives. First is Apple Video Player. This application has been bundled with Macs since the AV Quadras (from memory) and is actually pretty neat. You can input an analogue or digital source and capture video to a hard drive at three quality/compression levels and its saves it to a SimpleText movie file (playable in any QuickTime-aware application, of course). You can grab frames or clips to put on the net or mail to people. Does NTSC and PAL and is very easy to use. And, of course, you can't beat the price. I'm never quite sure whether iMovie 1.02 (remember the first iteration?) is free or not. Neither is Apple, as they keep removing it and replacing it on their download servers. And iMovie 2.0 is a native Carbon download for OS X right now I think. Buy a new iMac, iBook or PowerBook and you'll get iMovie 2.0 as part of the software bundle. Despite its deceptively simple interface, iMovie 1.02 is a powerful DV-only editing suite. It recognises your DV cam and you can pile up streams of vision as clips on the shelf - ready for editing. Then add title, transition effects and stir. As far as I can tell, it works on any Mac running OS 8.6 or later. You don't even need FireWire if you have a heap of DV clips sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Just dump them in iMovie's Media folder and they'll appear on the shelf, ready to edit. Add music and voilà: you've made your first movie. By the way, Apple has just released a bundle of free iMovie plug-ins for the OS X version, so go get 'em. A third el-cheapo option is QuickTime from Apple itself. Yes, QuickTime is a (limited) video editor. To do more than play movies, you'll need to invest in the $29.95 QuickTime Pro (now at version 5.0) which gives you access to a variety of features, such as exporting MPEG or QuickTime to DV. Don't do anything too lengthy though: converting to other formats on anything longer than a minute or two can take all night (and all day), and I don't care how fast your Mac is. Converting iMovies to QuickTime compression format is just as slow (probably slower). QuckTime also permits you to simply cut and paste clips to form a single movie of any length as quickly and as easily as cutting and pasting text. Unbelieveably intuitive and probably the quickest thing you can do in movie editing if you want to dump together a video/movie sample together very rapidly. And you don't need anything special to do this with either; any quietly rotting, dusty 68040 or Power Mac can do this, so long as they have the data available and a copy of QuickTime Pro. On the shareware front, for $15 you can have BTV View or BTV Edit. BTV View permits DV or analogue capture in all the formats supported by QuickTime, such as Sorensen video, Cinepak and Motion JPEG. BTV Edit does the same things as BTV View, but it additionally supports exporting DV back to a FireWire-equipped camera, as well as a number of other features. Again, the price is good. An inexpensive commercial alternative is iRez's ReelEyes video capturing software ($39.95). Not an editing application, but a fairly sophisticated capture/compress/export product. Like Final Cut Pro and Premiere, ReelEyes will let you designate up to 3 hard drives for recording (like a RAID system, sort of ) so if one drive runs out of space while you're recording, it'll simply keep recording onto the next one (hopefully) without hesitation. If you buy iRez's $90 Capsure PC card, a real-time Zoomed Video input card (for capturing analogue video from a VCR or analogue camera), you get ReelEyes thrown in for free (if nothing else, the Capsure is great for watching full-screen TV on your PowerBook). The Capsure works on the PowerBook 3400 or later (including the PowerBook 2400). It works with Final Cut Pro and Premiere 6.0 (yes), as well as Apple Video Player and the BTV software. See? Who fed you that crap that there's no software for the Mac? Cutting From our favorite fruit vendor, there's Final Cut Pro (FCP), now available in version 2.0 for a mere $995. I'm only familiar with version 1.2.5 and I read somewhere that the the guy responsible for FCP also wrote the core code in Adobe's Premiere (of which more later), which explains why a lot of interface elements look fairly similar. FCP also continues the brushed-metal look introduced by QuickTime 4.0 and also employed by iDVD, iMovie and iTunes. Apple positions FCP as a powerful but budget-priced alternative to high-end editing suites, such as those produced by Avid. Where FCP wins out is in its simplicity. Sure, you'll have to read the manual to really explore all of its features, but if you're an iMovie veteran, the learning curve is not at all steep. Unlike cheaper alternatives, like ReelEyes, FCP is less likely to drop frames from higher-resolution captures, even on less than optimum hardware. FCP also makes it easy to make a connection to a DV camera and, when it can't find one, defaulting to an analogue source if necessary. Once you get to FCP's two video windows, you won't find it too unfamiliar if you've worked in iMovie. Simply drag video or audio clips to the TimeLine editing window. Clips are organised in a 'Browser' window which lists all the clips you've added as 'sequences'. You can add or delete at will, or perform effects upon sequences, such as adjusting opacity, pixelating or blurring. Final Cut's exporting capabilities are solid without being spectacular, with QuickTime, AVI and DV streams supported. Connections to FireWire DV cameras are quick and easy. It also makes it easier to link up to sometimes-troublesome Sony i.Link-equipped cameras by supporting a generic form of IEEE-1394. Premiering at a Theatre Near You Final Cut Pro's main competitor is Adobe's Premiere, which recent reached version 6.0 ($530 street). Fortunately for Adobe, Premiere 6.0 represents a major improvement over the previous incarnation which was slow and often messy and kludgy. Given its competitive price, I'd say that Premiere 6.0 just sneaks ahead of Final Cut 1.2.5 on features, although I'm sure FCP 2.0 will remedy that, but I haven't had any experience with FCP 2.0 yet, so I can't comment. Both Premiere 6.0 and FCP demand similar hardware and system resouces: a G3, preferably running 300MHz or faster, plus 65MB of application RAM. This should be seen as a minimum though; I'd recommend 96MB of RAM for serious editing and more if you've got it. In my testing, Premiere is a little slower than FCP. But only in some areas. For example, you can preview the footage you've edited without rendering it. In FCP 1.2.5, rendering is necessary and slow, depending on your hardware. On the other hand, Premiere slows down considerably when adding transitional effects or using the coloring or embossing effects available on the palette. Premiere also allocates Function keys to oft-used commands, which is a boon to video editors performing repetitive tasks. By comparison, Final Cut is more point-and-click oriented. My personal preference is to do as much from the keyboard as possible. This version of Premiere is also much more DV-savvy than its predecessor, with connect-and-click access to a DV camera hooked up to your Mac. Despite reviews to the contrary, it works fine with analogue video capture cards (like the Capsure) although it involves a bit more monkeying about before you can get it to work. Adobe has also worked hard on audio integration in this version, particularly in terms of importing various audio formats, so it's easy to integrate, mix and alter your video's soundtrack. I did find that I could get spoken-word audio out of sync with the video track very easily though, something that didn't happen with Final Cut. It's possible that the hardware wasn't fast enough to keep up - but in my tests (at the marvellously sophisticated labs we have here at IGM - well, my back room with the rising damp and stale pizza on the floor, whatever), this wasn't something that occurred with the same video footage and hardware in Final Cut. Cleaning From Terran comes a slew of professional video packages, including the recently-released Cleaner 5.0. Just as we go to press here, Terran has also announced a new version of Media 100 which promises 'lossless'-quality DV. We'll have to wait to get our hands on it before we can verify that claim. However, Cleaner has a legitimate claim to be all things to all video editors and Cleaner boasts involvement in movies like the Blair Witch Project (or something). Version 5.0 improves considerably upon 4.0, with a fairly intuitive (if vaguely Windows-ish) interface which even novice video editors wouldn't have too much trouble picking up. Cleaner supports most, if not all, of the leading video formats, including QuickTime, AVI and Windows Media. The bottom line is that if you need access to different video codecs, you need Cleaner. This is especially the case if you're preparing multi-platform video distribution or for streaming on the web. Whereas Final Cut Pro's lingua franca is QuickTime, not all sites support QuickTime streaming, so if you want to encode your video in Windows Media format for web delivery, you need Cleaner. Studioing Two recent offerings from Apple give you MPEG-2 (DVD Video) authoring capabilities on your desktop: iDVD (bundled with Power Mac G4/733s) and DVD Studio Pro ($995). iDVD is really Apple's equivalent of iMovie. Because it lack VBR encoding, iDVD limits you to one hour of DVD video time but it lets you build, burn and distribute the DVD media very easily. The interface is pretty intuitive and the Power Mac's DVD-R/CDRW 'SuperDrive' burns at 2x which means your one-hour video will be ready in two hours. I guess we live in hope that the SuperDrive finds itself in the next iMac and PowerBook revisions (not holding my breath here). But at least the arrival of the Pioneer OEM unit (and more to come) as IDE drives gives you the option of putting it in a FireWire enclosure and hooking it up to your 'Book (for crissakes, don't buy a Compaq with a DVD-R in it, unless you're goung to rip it to shreds and just save the DVD-R). You don't need the Power Mac 733 to do DVD though. You can use DVD Studio Pro on your PowerBook G4 and assemble your DVD for mastering on another machine - or a service bureau. This means that if you're, say, shooting a wedding video, you can download clips via FireWire to your PowerBook or start putting them together while you're mobile. DVD Studio Pro lets you insert up to 99 tracks on a single DVD disc, with track markers for easy navigation through the movie. You can insert links, add menus - you name it. Just messing about with it, I was hooked. Essentially, you can put together pretty professional results in very little time with DVD Studio. And there's no Windows application which comes within a bull's roar of its intuitiveness of interface and general user-friendliness. Toasting What's Toast and video got to do with one another?, you may ask. VideoCDs, that's what. Instead of the MPEG-2 (DVD Video) standard, the latest Toast 5.0 (or earlier versions of Toast, if you use the correct third-party software) supports drag-and-drop conversions of video streams into MPEG-1 (VideoCD or VCD) standard. VCD is a cheap and easy way to make your own movies and distribute them as you can use plain old blank CDRs or CDRWs to make them with. If you're (legally) copying a commercial VCD you own, this is a pretty easy two-stage process: extract and burn as a VCD. Building your own is a little more complicated, but Toast 5.0 simplifies things considerably for you. Simply drag a movie to Toast's window and wait...and wait...and wait...and Toast will convert it to MPEG-1 format. You can put 74 or 80 minutes of material on a VCD and it'll take all night to encode it and I don't care how fast your Mac is. But once you've done it, you can of course quickly bang off several copies. Note that for some strange reason (which Complete Amateurs don't understand) CDRWs seem to work better for burning VCDs - especially when it comes to playing them back on your home DVD player. Don't ask me why. My head hurts right now. If you use Toast 3x or 4x, you'll need to find a copy of Astarte's M-Pack which turns your video into MPEG-1 and makes it 'Toast-ready'. It takes just as long as Toast and essentially does what Toast 5 does for you now. Put it this way: it'd just be easier to upgrade to Toast 5.0 (and, as a bonus, you'll be able to get Disc Burner happening if you haven't already). Burning Can I pirate - er - copy DVD movies? Depends. You'd need to crack the encryption code. In some (most) countries, it's illegal to even distribute this code. You can't buy cracks for this, but they're readily available on the web. Although I'm certainly not going to tell you where to get them. Being a Complete Amateur, I'm not even sure where they are right now. Oh yeah. Over there in a box. Whatever you're doing, make sure the DVDs you burn are playable on your home DVD system. Some recent anecdotal evidence suggests that the newer DVD models are becoming more tolerant of burned discs. DVD burners are becoming more commonplace now. Pioneer's OEM version of Apple's SuperDrive can be yours for around $1,000. This is a far cry from some of the $9,000 SCSI-based DVD-Rs that are on the market. Which means DVD-R burning technology is within reach of the Complete Amateur. It's also a pretty fair bet that DVD-R will be the standard (maybe DVD-RAM as well for a while) for storage and distribution of large volumes of data and complex multimedia titles, superseding the relatively low-volume storage capabilities of CDR/W. And come on, get real: how many times can you watch Pulp Fiction anyway? Go rent it - it's a lot quicker than 4 hours (minimum) of DVD burning anyway. That's All Folks PowerBooks and iBooks, suitably equipped with right software, are the idea portable media for previewing and rough-cutting your movie on the road before heading back for the Big Editing Session. Even when they were grave-robbing...er... shooting footage for Titanic way down on the ocean floor off the coast of Halifax, there were a couple of PowerBooks in situ playing back the footage they'd just filmed. I've already seen lots of people go the DV movie route: I saw rushes from a commerical movie a while back shot entirely on DV and the quality was bright and crisp. My bet is that the next generation of film makers will be - and already are - shooting their projects on DV. For a start, you can really produce a feature-length project on DV, instead of a fuzzy, 10-minute 16mm film which cost an arm and a leg. TV cameras are frequently Digital Betacam these days, so experience with DVD editing is likely to be a bonus - if not a replacement for training - for people wanting to enter fields like camera work or TV production. A great many are already using iMacs and PowerBooks to do this. This is a critical niche market Jobs identified when he stated that he thought movie making would be as big as desktop publishing. It's not yet; it's just filtering down to that critical mass of people - consumers - who'll deliver the kind purchasing numbers that will make home DV production as common as recording a show on your VCR. The Mac has really been first to market with this kind of technology and its up to Apple to disseminate it so thoroughly that they own this market segment. They still own DTP. They should have owned the Palm market. It would be a tragedy if they lost this creative niche market to the Wintel juggernaut. Because Windows PCs don't deserve this market. Because Wintel have done nothing to innovate consumer video. And because it would have been avoidable.