Kylee Pena
Forum Replies Created
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I knew I wanted to be in post when I went to college, but I still went with a program that covered more than that. The downside to this is that I didn’t always focus on post production stuff. The upside is that I learned a lot of other stuff that is really good to know as an editor and mograph designer. You may want to be in animation/graphics/post, but you’ll be stronger if you understand the entirety of video production, and college is a great place to make this happen.
If you approach it like this, you’ll have to put a lot of your own time in. You should work really hard in the classes you find most relevant. Get to know the instructors. Go to their office hours and just talk about the industry. My college had independent studies where you could take 3 credit hours (1 course) to focus on something the school didn’t exactly offer, working alongside one of the instructors. I did this twice to fill in a lot of gaps. I did internships that were more focused in post. I did a lot of side projects on my own, a lot of additional learning. And take courses outside of your major — business, art, public speaking, my university even had a wine tasting class. That’s pretty important for our industry too, IMO.
And for a time in college, I did wonder if maybe producing and writing was a thing I’d like more. Spent part of an internship doing it. I’m an editor now. HA!
Basically, don’t worry that every class isn’t 100% relevant, and don’t resent the ones you find less useful. Because you’ll use something from every course, eventually.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
If you’re exporting for YouTube, they have their own suggestions.
Otherwise, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and what kind of player you’re using. You have to decide what’s an acceptable level of compression vs size for what your audience needs. Maybe start around 1500kbps as the max bitrate and see what happens? Keep the audio as high quality as you can though. Not much to be saved in file size for what you sacrifice in quality.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
I would do as much audio editing in FCP as you can, and then you can send clips from FCP to STP after you have the edit locked. STP has a nice noise reducer, and there’s a lot of nice time savers you can do to make this process easier. It’ll definitely be worth the minor learning curve.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
I think that you’ll eventually drive yourself crazy having to go back and forth between iMovie and FCP. It’s very limiting because you can’t make adjustments on the fly.
I would say learn audio editing in FCP and save yourself a lot of trouble later on. I mean, if it works for you and it’s just a little side project, that’s fine. But what if it becomes something more? What if you eventually want to do a proper mix on it? You can’t because all your wavs have your sound files all baked in permanently, so you’d have to go back in and redo it.
Audio editing isn’t really THAT difficult in FCP, what is it that draws you to iMovie? Familiarity? Or is there a function of it you like better? Just curious, I haven’t been in iMovie for a while. Honestly, a quick run through something like the Apple Pro Training series books or some Ripple Training will get you pretty well up to speed.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
Basically whenever you feel like it should cut. I would never cut for the sake of cutting, or because “we’ve been on this angle a while I guess.”
Or if you need to cover up stumbles, obviously.
You can also cut for impact. Cutting to the closer angle during an emotional or particularly important statement, maybe.
Just don’t over-think it. There’s no solid rules for any of this.
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It sounds like you’re talking about FCPX? You may have better luck in the FCPX techniques forum. This basics forum tends to be mostly FCP7 people. Hopefully they can help you out!
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
Again – a DVD is a DVD. There is nothing special about making it work in a standard DVD player or Mac or PC. They’re all DVD drives. The only differences would be if you add additional functionality that only works in computer drives (like within DVD Studio Pro “DVD @ccess”). But that stuff really doesn’t work very well. I think even the DVD @ccess doesn’t work across platforms 99% of the time, I can’t remember.
And yea, you need to make sure the region is set correctly. There’s a simple setting for that in DVD Studio Pro.
(I’d also agree BitVice is superior if you can get ahold of it.)
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
I’m wondering if the AVI files are throwing DVDSP off? See, DVDSP uses .m2v files for video (and a separate .ac3 file for audio). When you put something else in the software, it transcodes it to this. So it could be transcoding wrong depending on what’s in that AVI container.
Do you have access to Compressor? If so, use that and find the highest quality DVD preset. Then take the m2v and ac3 files that are generated and put those in DVDSP. You’ll know it’s right because pretty much immediately, the files will have a little green circle next to them. The AVI files have either a red or yellow circle, I can’t remember which, while DVDSP re-encodes them in the background.
(If not Compressor, try the free program MPEG Streamclip. I’m not sure about exporting from Vegas.)
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing with build/format. It sounds to me like you’re setting everything up in the project and saving it, then opening it up and hitting burn whenever you need a new copy. Instead, go up to the top navigation and select “build”. This creates the DVD files (video_ts folder). Then you can select “format” and it’ll actually burn the files. Also, if you select build, you could use a different software to simply burn that disk image onto a DVD without having to open DVDSP anymore. I think Jessica mentioned a few – you just set it up to burn an authored DVD with a pre-existing disk image. In DVDSP, if you select “burn”, it’s much more likely to error. I *think* the reason is because it does the building of files and the burning at the same time, and the building of files is temporary, so there’s more room for error.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
1) You shouldn’t be using avi files. DVDSP transcoding these to the proper format within the software is making them look like crap and potentially leading to some of your issues.
2) Don’t use “Burn” in DVDSP. “Build” first, then “Format” each disk you need. Or follow Jessica’s advice to use another software to burn multiple copies.
3) Check all your end jumps and stuff. Do you have scripts? Something might be messed up and causing the DVD to break.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com -
Jessica gave you a pretty good understanding here. You’ll need to look in the DVDSP manual for more info about linking buttons and navigation and such. It’s easy to forget something and have a DVD that doesn’t work right.
I just wanted to throw in that “Send to Compressor” is usually not a good way to go. The best way to get a file out of FCP7: Go to Export, Quicktime Movie, and check the self-contained box. Then open up Compressor and drop that in. Send to Compressor is slow and funky. Then you’ll have the m2v and ac3 the same way. As a bonus, the self-contained mov file can also be used as a master copy of the timeline to archive.
Another side note: in DVD Studio Pro, it’s better to do “build” and “format” separately, and not use “burn” at all. “Build” creates the DVD files (“video_ts” folder and contents, if you’ve ever seen that). “Format” burns those onto the DVD. By keeping the processes separate, there’s less chance that DVDSP will screw it up.
And as far as “best format to give me the most wide-ranging chance…”, I’m not exactly sure what you mean? A DVD is a DVD, it’ll play in any DVD player – set top, computer, etc. The files you use to create the DVD don’t matter in that sense, they just matter in terms of what DVD Studio Pro wants. If you want to give someone a file to be able to play it on their computer, the m2v and ac3 streams aren’t going to work for that.
blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com