phoebe said:
Rob,
I guess the best way to learn anything is to just dive in and do it, right?
Certainly can't hurt. It can just be more pressure when you're trying to actually work on a real life project for it. Doing it in your spare time at least can afford mistakes hehe.
I think many independent filmmakers are now taking advantage of this medium as a means of getting their work noticed on a worldwide scale. That's the sole objective of my client.
I agree 100%. For someone who is trying to get their work noticed, the internet is a great forum for it.
I do have firewire and iDVD. My client wants to burn the episodes onto standard individual DVDs and give them to me that way. I guess I was assuming that I would be able to capture the episode off the DVD and put it into Quicktime. So, are you saying that he has to transfer it over to MiniDv first, and then I would import it to my mac through the camera?
If they are on beta tapes, there has to be a step to get them to your hard drive, and then to DVD. So, one way or another it has to become data if you're the one who's burning the dvd for him. Since, you don't have a beta cam or deck laying around, espeically one that would have a firewire connection, you have no choice but to take his media, and convert it to a format that you can at some point capture to your system.
The easiest thing I can think of is to do a deck to deck transfer, from beta to MiniDV, and then take a MiniDV deck or camera, and firewire to your mac, and then capture.
You want to make sure you're in standard NTSC 48k 4:3 when you go to capture. When captured it'll be a quicktime movie, so there's no need to render anything else. Basically, from there you'd bring that into IDVD and go to town.
Ok, so considering the file size, and once I capture the footage for streaming, I have to find some kind of software that would compress it before it goes on the web, right? Would Quicktime do something like this or would I have to spend big $$ on new software?
I'm not sure what you're using for editing. If you are using final cut express or pro, regardless quicktime is the backbone for those systems.
It's free to encode with quicktime. As long as you have the player you could compress it. It's best if you have software like cleaner, final cut, and possibly imovie, but I've never used it.
Bottomline for you. It should cost absolutely nothing to create streaming, compressed quicktime movies. As I said in the first post, creating Windows Media Video files is also an option. However, the encoding application is only for PC as of right now. The Player is used on both mac and pc. (If you go that route, you have to make sure of something. When you encode, the encoder and the player on your system HAVE to be the same version or you're going to run into problems very quickly.)
One of my concerns, is that the hosting company my client is with currently supports Real Audio/Video. I agree with your advice about Quicktime and would like to stick with that instead. Does this mean I would have to find him another host that supports QuickTime? Also, during my research I discovered that there are actual streaming hosts out there who specifically cater to websites that have streaming media. Have you had any experience with them?
When you say they support real audio and video, does this mean they have a real audio streaming server? All "web servers" have the ability to handle virtually ANY file type. All it's really doing is sending the data once you request it via http or ftp. Now, if you mean they have a specific feature that can let the movies play in a queue or something, where it is a true "streaming server" then that's a whole other ball game.
From what it sounds to me though, it sounds like it's just a web server and they say it supports real media files. When I say whole other ball game, I mean to say, that you may then have problems using other files if that server specifically is a real media streaming server.
Both windows media player and quicktime offer free information and data in order to set up a "streaming server." This is an unnecessary step as all you need to do is either have a direct link to the video, or embed the video into the page to watch, and it will stream b/c the file is design to stream(i.e. it can be watched while it's downloading).
My advice is go with quicktime streaming files. I think they overall can look a bit better than the WMV files. Also, nearly everyone has both wmv and qt players, so again they are more universal than real media. And i think real media quality isn't that great.
My Mac is a G4 800 MHz with 62.56 GB. I have the entire root folder for the website on my desk top and once I get this going, it will also store the file for the episode. My friends laugh at me when I get concerned about used up space on my hard drive despite having 62.56 gigs. I guess it should be fine.. right?? (Just humor me on this one Rob!)
Between the PC i use for storage to my left and my G5 right here, I've got in the pc, a 20 gig drive, an 80 gig drive, a 120 gig drive; and in the G5 I have a 160 gig drive, and an external firewire 800 160 gig drive. And I can say with no doubt in my mind I want another internal 250 gig drive for a scratch disk for projects just like what you're talking about.
You're 60 gigs are going to go very very quickly. In my opinion you should invest in an external drive for capture and storage that is at least firewire 400, but if there is a way to utilize an 800 do so. You're going to need the storage capacity. The files you put up on the site for download might eventually total a few gigs worth after getting most of the episodes up, but realistically you're going to have 20-30 gig capture files per episode.
I've got a wedding I did which totaled roughly 40 minutes of total air time, that is a 100gig project, from captured files, to rendered output files, to everything i prepared before going to DVD.
Thanks for your patience. Hope you can assist with these follow up questions. Once again, you were a tremendous help starting me off in the right direction. Much appreciated...
Wow I feel like i just wrote the preface for the bill of rights or something.
Anyway, you're welcome. Hopefully this'll help more. There's alot to learn and know about when it comes to video and streaming. In my opinion it's like deciding you want to learn PHP having never looked at script and to just jump right in. Obviously, it's not as abstract, but there's still plenty to know.
