Project Snapshot: Put together a home video post production suite based on the networked model used in Hollywood Difficulty Rating: Surprisingly easy (but don't expect George Lucas results first time out)
Estimated time: 2-4 hours You're getting content from everywhere -- video, photos, music, the web, school, work. Reality TV rules and this is the stuff it is made from. It begs to be turned into entertaining home videos and slide shows. However, the dark side of content quickly raises its head: You are constantly out of disk space to store and retrieve everything.
You have four options - delete stuff, rip open your PC and add yet another drive, buy an expensive external drive solution, or ignore the great new stuff.
Delete? Never, because the minute you do, you know you'll immediately need it!
Crack the lid? That's only for techies -- real people don't do that.
Expensive external storage? Smart, frugal people don't do that.
Ignore? Hey it's good stuff. You can't do that, either!
The solution is what Hollywood does: create a video post production suite of your own that uses an affordable powerful software-based editing system, such as Sonic Solutions' DVDit! or Apple's Final Cut Pro, a good LCD flat-screen monitor, a pair of stereo speakers, and the real secret: an array of drives (of the hard and disc varieties) configured in a sort of "apartment house" that allows you, the digital landlord, to move new tenants (faster drives and more data) into a stack of ready-made housing that cuts down on cabling, allows you to pull video and other content from a variety of sources instantly, bypass the morass of interformat OS compatibility, and put out new family blockbusters faster than the Three Stooges churned out shorts for Columbia Pictures.
The Basics We're not going to spend a lot of time on the editing software or video or audio monitors; there are plenty of reviews of DVDit! and Final Cut Pro you can base your decision on, and you can set up your editing station on any desktop computer.
But a quick word about ergonomics. Set up the computer monitor and speakers on a flat surface, such as a desk, with the screen and the speakers within easy reach. Keep the video monitor a bit lower than the top of your head, so you're looking slightly downward at it, and the speakers on either side of the screen.
As many film and television post editors will tell you, cobbling together a finished product requires a critical monitoring environment - one in which you'll be comfortable for long stretches of time as you get into the editing process. The screen should be at a comfortable viewing angle and the speakers positioned so that you can hear without having to have the volume up high, which causes ear fatigue.
The Apartment Building We used the ADS Tech Dual-Link Drive enclosures because there's no point in reinventing the wheel. The ADS enclosures are stackable, can hold any of the types of drives commonly used (hard drives, DVD and CD drives, recordable media drives), have their own internal universal power supply, and come preconfigured for both FireWire and USB cabling.
The main source for content for home family videos will likely be the video camera itself. If it's running the DV format, you can post it into the computer via USB and take the data in directly, using the camera as an external drive. But less than 20 minutes of digital footage will create a file as large as 4-GB, so it makes sense to transfer the footage to a recordable disc (DVD-R) or an external hard drive.
People often want to include content from other sources, some of which reside on VHS tape. A converter, like ADS's Pyro AV Link, will convert analog information to the DV format. There's a myriad of other sources for content, including CDs.
(See sidebar on content protection.) This is part of what makes the apartment house model so useful: you can draw content out of an array of sources without constantly fiddling with changing out disc or hooking up external drives. FireWire connections theoretically allow as many as 16 drive devices to be daisy-chained sequentially with no device ID conflicts, though you likely won't need more than three to six at the most to make great home movies.
USB connections can't be daisy-chained, but a USB hub, such as the ADS Ultra Hub 4, will allow between five and seven drive devices to be accessed instantly (theoretically you could do up to 127 devices but that's a little overkill). Also, with FireWire and USB, unlike SCSI, you don't have to worry about terminators or device IDs. ADS's FireWire enclosure has ports for both FW 800 and 400, so it's backwards compatible with older computers that only have FW400 ports. FireWire or USB - it's your call.
Either works wonderfully, and anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot SCSI conflicts and termination errors will appreciate their ease of use.
Furthermore, most new drives enter the market as internal versions. Having homes waiting for them in the form of format-agnostic drive housings gives you an edge on accommodating new technology.
Position the drive stack near the editing station, but not necessarily on top of it. You can place on the desktop or off to the side. Either the FireWire or USB hub options will result in only a single cable to the computer. (Which can also be off the desk for nice clean look. But leave space between it and the drive stack on the floor to avoid thermal buildup.)
In a typical "apartment house," you'll have two hard drives, a CD-R player/burner and two DVD-R player/burners - one as a content storage device and one as the "final mix" platform. This approach to drive management allows you to keep your drives at the leading edge in terms of performance and capacity. It also has another benefit: you can run multiple OS - Windows, Mac or Linux - without having to reformat/partition the computer's internal drive.
With your drive array in place, you can begin to edit in the "A/B roll" style:
previewing content from various drives before assembling them in the workstation.
Hollywood film and video editors do this from TB-sized drives networked throughout their post facilities. You've now achieved the home version of that. You're ready for your closeup. Mr. DeMille!
# # #
Sidebar: Content Protection There's been a lot of controversy about content and intellectual property (IP)
protection in recent years. Most content that you don't create yourself is copyrighted in some way or another, and the law carries significant penalties for commercial misuse of IP.
However, the law is also on your side. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Act of 1998, you are allowed to use copyrighted material that you have acquired legitimately for personal use. The license to do so is implicit in the act of purchasing the content, in the form of DVDs, CDs, still photos or other graphics. So get creative!
--Dan Daley For more information:
www.adstech.com <www.adstech.com
www.howstuffworks.com <www.howstuffworks.com
Post Production Studios Like the Pros Without the Big Budget - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
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