[Martin Curtis]

Find the track in the Finder. Open it in QT7 Pro. Export as AIFF. Use that.

[Martin Curtis]

Greg Ondeira and Mike Cohen are the surgical video experts here – I’m just learning. The only suggestions I have are be on good speaking terms with everyone in the room before everyone starts donning masks and the person requesting the vid needs to make sure everyone is on board with the shoot so you can ask/suggest things to make the shoot worthwhile. And don’t drop anything in the patient.

[Martin Curtis]

Two things come to mind:
1. Earset mic (here’s an example)
2. OT noise. There’s lots of stuff happening. Every time I turn up in theatre, everyone looks nervously at me and says “you won’t be recording any audio will you?”. The anaesthetists are probably afraid patients will hear them gabbing on about their last trip to Europe, or their new Beemer.

[Martin Curtis]

Thanks for that idea. I have the same problem. A surgeon wants to record commentary in theatre. They usually wear multiple gowns so you can’t place the lav in the normal lapel-ish position but I hadn’t thought of the head. These guys wear head lamps so I can use that fitting to help me.

OT, but above this reply box is an ad for a Panasonic 3D camera. Surgery in 3D … mmmmm. “Uh oh, we have a bleeder.”

[Martin Curtis]

I use an ADVC110 to convert analog to digital. It also has a super secret macrovision defeating trick.

Alternatively, I use a VHS/DVD recorder and rip the DVD. Probably not as professional, but neither are the tapes I get.

[Martin Curtis]

Any particular reason you are going with ProRes? I do all sorts of stuff with DVD conversions (for not very demanding tasks) and I convert to QuickTime Movs using DV compressor. DV is perfectly suited to that frame size. The audio automatically sets to uncompressed and all is good.

25 mbps versus 100+ mbps means I save space too.

[Martin Curtis]

Beautifully summarised. Straight to the three-chambered reptilian heart of how a manager thinks. I’d like to add:

[Bob Zelin] “”hey, we can get some smart new college kid who we can push around, who knows FCP and After Effects, and pay him less than half of John Grote Jr. with his 24 years of experience”.”

[Martin Curtis]

[Mark Suszko] “a single-camera, one-angle, three-hour tape of some guy slowly reading an instruction manual,”
That was me. I filmed it. I advised against it, but I still did it. It’s part of mandatory training but most people can’t even remember the title.

[Martin Curtis]

60 MB, 20 minutes. That’s 3MB/minute or 24 mbit/minute which is 0.4mbps or 400 kbps. About 300kbps for video, let’s say. Doable but not pretty.

Are you sure no limits were placed on the overall length of the project? If not, you will have to explain why it looks less than stellar (besides containing YouTube clips) or, as suggested, cut it down. Did anyone at school suggest what codec to deliver?

Anyways, in order to do it you’ll need something to compress it with. May I suggest MPEG Streamclip (MPS).

Open your movie in MPS, and select file -> export to MPEG4. Compression will already be set to H.264 .

Check the “Limit Data Rate” box to 256 Kbps (strictly speaking it should be “kbps” since “kilo” is indicated by a lowercase k, but since the uppercase K means Kelvin, I’m pretty sure he means “kilo”).

Sound: mono, 24 kHz and 64 kbps.

If you have any interlaced video, now would be the time to deinterlace it, but ProRes is progressive so that’s not a problem here.

Make MP4. This will be a slow process.

Check the quality. If the quality really isn’t good, there’s 2 parameters you can adjust: frame size and frame rate. Drop frame size by 50% (in both dimensions – MPS doesn’t have a “keep proportional” checkbox).

Make MP4. This will be a slow process.

Hope this helps, or at least fails to confuse further.

[Martin Curtis]

Nearly there: MovCaptioner

MovCaptioner keeps repeating a segment of the movie until you are done typing what you hear. Just hit the Return key and it will save your caption and automatically advance to the next few seconds of the movie, allowing you to zip through your captioning tasks in no time flat. And, if you use MacSpeech Dictate, you can just speak the captions and it will type them for you right into the MovCaptioner interface, the absolute easiest way to create captions for your videos.

I haven’t used it with MacSpeech Dictate, and my experience with MovCationer itself is minimal, but it’s worth a look.