Wedding video editing

Netnut

I am getting married next year and there will be a few people recording the event with camcorders. I would like to get the best bits from all the videos edited onto a single DVD. Is there anywhere i could get this done reliably or could i have i go myself. I have a PC but not sure if its up to the job, its a few years old. 700Mhz 256 ram no DVD writer

Thanks for any help

ThreadKiller

Your PC is too old. a reasonable spec system would be about 2Ghtz processor, 100(+)GB Hard drive & 1GB of RAM.

I've done a few wedding vids now & the average ceremony is 80 minutes & an additional 20/40 minutes for the speeches miscellanous stuff at the end. You can expect about 800MB of hard drive per minute of footage at best quality, so from those calculations you need approx 170GB of hard drive space for the raw footage & edited version. Then you need processing & rendering space.

My system has 3 200GB hard drives & I'm pressed for space most of the time.

I'd recommend something like pinnacle studio or even movie maker coupled with sonic's my dvd (XP) if you've never done it before.

Good luck

IgnatiusJRiley

Get a new pc and do it yourself. I did and it was fairly straight-forward. Just get and audio/video capture device and it'll probably come with editing software. Burning the finished DVD will be straight-forward as well.

Lump

my friend has a business that does it. www.glasseye.ie although I think he's stopped taking weddings as he's got commercial work on now.


John

IgnatiusJRiley

ThreadKiller wrote:

You can expect about 800MB of hard drive per minute of footage at best quality

800MB for one minute!!!!! That sounds savage! You do realise a DVD can only hold 4.7 gb (well the single-layer ones anyway)

lodgepole

IgnatiusJRiley wrote:

800MB for one minute!!!!! That sounds savage! You do realise a DVD can only hold 4.7 gb (well the single-layer ones anyway)

DVD uses compressed video, but you should edit the film completely uncompressed. Your DVD software will take care of the compression. I'm fairly sure you'll be able to put around two hours onto a single layer DVD.

I use a 40GB hard disk for my video editing which fits around an hour of full quality DV footage. Once the project is complete I tend to export it as an AVI to another hard disk. You don't need to do that though, you can export the project directly to tape if you want.

Fr0g

High spec PC, Video capture card, firewire card, DVD burner, DVD software
It's a lot of money to spend just to create one DVD.

There are businesses who will do this at a fraction of the price. google in ireland for it.

boards rules disallow me from pimping my own website!

lodgepole

You don't need a high spec PC at all. The only real requirements are the DVD burner, a firewire card and enough hard disk space to handle the footage.

A friend of mine edits on a system not too dissimilar to what you described, it's an old machine and it does the job just fine. Render times are slower and you have to be especially careful with saving in case of crashes (you should do that regardless of your system though). A DVD burner is no more than €100 and a firewire card is only €20.

edit - my own computer is a P4 2.26Ghz with 256mb of memory, and I have a dedicated 40GB for digital video. You can pick up a machine like that for incredibly cheap from Dell, even cheaper if you buy the parts online and have the know how to build it yourself. If you do go for buying a new computer don't look at it as being purely for this video, it's a solid investment as i'm sure you know.

edit again - all of what i've said is on the assumption that all the camcorders will be recording onto digital video.

Fr0g

Lodgepole wrote:

edit - my own computer is a P4 2.26Ghz with 256mb of memory, and I have a dedicated 40GB for digital video. You can pick up a machine like that for incredibly cheap from Dell, even cheaper if you buy the parts online and have the know how to build it yourself. If you do go for buying a new computer don't look at it as being purely for this video, it's a solid investment as i'm sure you know.

edit again - all of what i've said is on the assumption that all the camcorders will be recording onto digital video.

I'm glad you cleared that up. I have a 3 ghz HT pentium with a gig of ram and I consider it slow for mpeg encoding. I still say it's a case of sledgehammer/nut

If different people are videoing the wedding chances are they will all have different camcorder types, so you would probably need analogue capture and digital capture.

Anyway congratulations netnut enjoy your day.

mycroft

The best way to do it, is load the footage in compresse (reduced resolution) to save hardrive space.

1. It makes the edit faster as the file sizes of uncompressed video is huge.

2. takes up less space.

After your finished, reconform (all decent editing software has this option) with just the stuff you used at full resolution.

Much more efficent

Pump Hole

ThreadKiller wrote:

Your PC is too old. a reasonable spec system would be about 2Ghtz processor, 100(+)GB Hard drive & 1GB of RAM.

I've done a few wedding vids now & the average ceremony is 80 minutes & an additional 20/40 minutes for the speeches miscellanous stuff at the end. You can expect about 800MB of hard drive per minute of footage at best quality, so from those calculations you need approx 170GB of hard drive space for the raw footage & edited version. Then you need processing & rendering space.

My system has 3 200GB hard drives & I'm pressed for space most of the time.

I'd recommend something like pinnacle studio or even movie maker coupled with sonic's my dvd (XP) if you've never done it before.

Good luck

Don't listen to this guy - he's just acting the big shot.

Your PC is more than ample for doing exactly what you want to do - except BURNING the DVD.

700mhz is fine for processing video (especially a wedding video), and 256MB of RAM will more than suffice. Most people aren't stupid enough to waste HD space capturing uncompressed video either - it's just crazy. Just use Microsoft DV compression (included with most editing packages) - it's only 4GB for 18mins, and you won't be able to tell the difference. Your video will end up being heavily compressed onto DVD anyway in the end, so there's no point wasting space editing uncompressed.
Did you ever try playing back an uncompressed video clip?? 7200rpm Hard Drives can't even read it fast enough because the filesize is so ridiculously big, so it jumps all over the place.

I'd recommend using Adobe Premiere to edit - just download the trial, mess around with the tutorials, and it will give you 30 days trial time to edit the video - more than enough.

How can you tell someone to edit using feckin' Pinnacle software, and also tell them to capture uncompressed? That's like telling someone to put €10,000 alloy wheels on a 1989 Cortina.

And Sonic DVD is such disgusting software, it's makes me puke trying to author a DVD using it. Use Adobe Encore DVD - it's far more versatile and works with all other Adobe products.

lodgepole

Pump Hole wrote:

Did you ever try playing back an uncompressed video clip?? 7200rpm Hard Drives can't even read it fast enough because the filesize is so ridiculously big, so it jumps all over the place.

How can you tell someone to edit using feckin' Pinnacle software, and also tell them to capture uncompressed? That's like telling someone to put €10,000 alloy wheels on a 1989 Cortina.

I edit with uncompressed video (though DV is actually compressed regardless) and have no problem whatsoever with the video jumping. With Premiere if you capture from DV and leave the camera plugged in and switched on, the video will jump. I've no idea why... Plug the camera out and it'll work perfectly.

Nothing wrong with Pinnacle Studio when you're not looking for proffesional level editing. I teach a class every summer to teenagers in video and editing, and I cut six 10 minute shorts with Pinnacle, capturing at full DV quality every time.

Lump

DV is compressed at 5 to 1. End of argument. Serial Uncompressed video has to be shoot on Hi-def.


John

mycroft

Lump wrote:

DV is compressed at 5 to 1. End of argument. Serial Uncompressed video has to be shoot on Hi-def.


John

John FFS he's trying to shoot a wedding video, he doesn't need to be bogged down in technical jargon about uncompressed video and DV compression rates.

Lump

Well I didn't start waffling on about compression rates in the first place. Bla, last time I contribute.


John

mycroft

Lump they're talking about adding additional compression to the video once digitized.

Bringing in the whole true compression of DV into a debate about a wedding video is just going to confuse the poor guy, who may end in the Sony center looking for a video capture card with Hi Def inputs because you've confused him isn't helpful advice.

Lump

Yes because I care so much.


John

davmigil

Netnut wrote:

I am getting married next year and there will be a few people recording the event with camcorders. I would like to get the best bits from all the videos edited onto a single DVD. Is there anywhere i could get this done reliably or could i have i go myself. I have a PC but not sure if its up to the job, its a few years old. 700Mhz 256 ram no DVD writer

Thanks for any help

You certainly could have a go yourself. A few pointers:

1.You can get a DVD burner from www.komplett.ie or www.overclockers.co.uk etc. OEM versions will come with no software, retail versions usually have some bundled software.
What operating system are you using? If you are using Windows 98 bear in mind that the maximum file size with fat32 file system is 4Gb (ie this is the longest clip you can capture,). If you are using Win2000 or XP with ntfs filesystem you won't have an issue.
700Mhz will be fine for editing. Where it will show its age is in the rendering stage (this is where the clip you have edited gets compressed to a DVD compliant MPEG). Don't worry though, just leave it to render overnight (I did this for years on a P3 500Mhz).

You will also need:

Firewire card to connect DV Camcorder (either you have one or a friend will lend you one?) to your PC (majority of new Camcorders). Handiest just to get the tapes off your friends.
If you want to get footage of analogue camcorders (like Hi-8 etc.) you will need an analogue capture solution in addition to firewire (or if your friends edit their video themselves on PC already, get them to burn the footage (in suitable form) to CD for you). Else obviously you will need to get hold of your friends camcorders too.

2.How much free hard drive space do you have? Best to do a series of short clips rather than going for the full movie shebang. Capture an amusing incident/short clip off the tape (the obligatory wedding punch up between the relatives etc), get the editing program to output it as a DVD compliant MPEG. Once finished deleted the raw captured clip to save disc space (the rendered footage will take up much less space) and start again.

Adobe Premiere is a great package (30 day trial good, but retail price a bit much!!), but be prepared for a learning curve. I would recommend you use something like Pinnacle Studio or Ulead Video Studio (trial versions available or sub €100 to buy) . Sometimes when you buy a firewire card you get some bundled software, which might do the trick.

3. For authoring the DVD (ie putting in menu, maybe with moving video clips and background sound) I recommend you get the trial version of Ulead DVD factory:

http://www.ulead.com/dmf/runme.htm

It's really simple to use (you just select the menu layout,background music and select your clips). Even if the imported clips aren't in the proper DVD mpeg format it can often convert them (but quality better if you have them in the proper format in the first place).

4. Don't hassle yourself (and especially your wife to be!)too much over it. There are more important things. Plenty of time after the wedding to sort it out (/me goes off to edit Christmas 2002 footage )

Also _maybe_

-Consider ordering an extra 256Mb Ram and an 80Gb + hard drive as well
-Sometimes the MPEG2 rendering (ie when it compresses the edited footage to DVD format) of budget editing packages isn't great. If you want to increase the quality of it consider outputting the edited footage not as DVD mpeg2 but as an avi in same format as captured footage. Then import this footage to something like TMPGenc encoder or Canopus Basic encorder and set the output as DVD compliant mpeg2.

Best of luck with everything,

Dave