movie formates

[Brian Barkley]

To begin with, can you tell us what camera and what non-linear editing system you will be using?

[Donald Christensen]

I have a mini DV and premier pro

I know nothing about movies. I don’t know what format I can do.

[Jeff Pulera]

A miniDV camera will shoot NTSC video, 720×480 pixels, in other words, standard definition (no HD). In Europe, it may be the PAL format.

In Premiere, you would choose the NTSC DV project preset and capture the video using 1394 Firewire. If your computer doesn’t have a 1394 port, then you need to add one with an inexpensive 1394 card.

“AVI” means “Audio/Video Interleaved” – the audio and video are combined in a single file, and this is the most common format to edit with on a PC.

After editing your video in Premiere, you would Export to the file format of choice, for instance MPEG-2 for DVD disc, Windows Media for your website, etc.

YouTube likes MPEG-4 video, known as H.264, and you should find a YouTube preset in the export settings of Premiere to create the final file to upload. My 10-yr. old daughter edits her own miniDV movies, and converts and uploads them to YouTube all by herself after I showed her just once.

Do some Google searches on editing, there is tons of free info out there, or you can buy books and DVDs to learn Premiere and such.

Jeff Pulera

[Donald Christensen]

Jeff

Thank you so much for your reply!

I tried to search Google but didn’t even know where to start. Now I have a much better idea. Thank you again!

I have a bit of learning to do. However after a while, I’d like to ask a few more questions (after I learn a bit more).

Can I please get your email?

[Greg Robbins]

Another good tip is to export your video into the highest possible quality, then compress it in another program (adobe media encoder, soreson squeeze, compressor). That way you can practice compressing in different ways and figure out which format is the best ratio of file size and quality. Compressing videos is more of a art form then a science, sometimes different codecs will be more preferable with different videos.

So export out of premiere (or whatever software which you’ve created your video) in the best quality lossless (miminal compression) file. Quicktime animation is usually my favorite choice. This file will be extremely large because it has barely any compression, if any at all. This file is not for realtime viewing, just to be used as a master file to create compressed “delivery” files from. I hope this makes sense, if not feel free to ask anything you may not understand, and I’ll try my best to better explain 🙂