I've spent the last week taking a crash course in digital video editing and converting. Everything I thought I knew before the training was wrong. I had more questions after finding some of the answers. A lot of trial and error was involved. A lot of Bing searches. A lot of forum reading. A lot of "free" video conversion malware to watch out for.
And a lot of taking notes, so I have a reference to go back to and to add more solutions to that I find from experimenting.
This all started when my dad asked me how to make a DVD using his Mac. I had no idea, but told him to look for something called iMovie or something. Well, he found iDVD in one of his folders. I have no idea how to use a Mac, so he did all the button pressing. I just made suggestions of how I would make a DVD if I was using any generic computer.
Five minutes later, he was watching his burned DVD on his TV.
So then I had the video bug. Only I didn't have any videos to start with. The differences between NTSC and HD and MP2 and MP4 and DivX and DV-AVI and WMV and... And getting the aspects correct and the FPS and the bit-rate and the audio Hz and the audio sync and the progressive/interlaced setting...
It's amazing any videos get made right. But 99% of HDTV viewers at home just press the zoom or stretch buttons anyway when they watch movies. They don't care about people with fat heads on their screen, or tops of heads being cut off. All that money they spend on HD equipment and they just want to watch their DVDs.
What you describe is part of the bane of my life - I work in Television Broadcast and we're constantly battling legacy formats to match current broadcast specs, and then a viewer will ring up and demand we fix his/her reception because there are black bands down the side of the picture.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't get ffdshow to work on my system. So gave up on it. Too much time wasted today.
ReplyDeleteBut I did try out Deshaker 3.0 on my shaky CG footage.
Amazing fun!