Rise Hour

For me, Rise Hour is that first hour of my day, from 5 AM til 6 AM, that is vitally necessary for me to wake up. I usually spend it cramming as much geekdom as I can into one hour. On most days, with family, work and school (homework included), it's the only chance I have all day to truly geek out. This morning's Rise Hour task, start learning how to edit video from my DV Camera. Yes, this sort of task normally will take more than just one hour, but I condense learning to fit my schedule. I have to break it up into many one hour sessions. Usually what happens though is I only learn just enough to make whatever it is I am doing semi-publishable. Take this Blog for instance...it's ok as far as design and content go. It could be far better though. Remember, I learn one hour at a time, so stick around, it will only get better everyday.

Back to the task at hand...There are two parts to this morning's challenge. One, transfer a single clip, non-edited, and make a movie file that will be decent quality, without having a file size too large to comfortably view from the site. Sounds simple enough, but which format do I choose? OK, let's try a few. My first attempt is a .wmv file with a res of 320 x 240 at 30 fps. This being a 4 minute clip that file came out way too big to be of any use to my blog. Moving on (for now), I created a quicktime file with a res of 160 x 120 at 15 fps and the results are not too shabby, but it is an 8 MB file. Next I made the same clip (same res and fps) into a real media file. This movie came out with almost the same quality but at 4 MB is only half the price. I still want better quality with less size so I may take that huge Windows Media file and encode it with Windows Media Encoder to see how that turns out, but that will have to wait til tomorrow.

Next I wanted to do a basic test drive of the editing software that came with my computer, MovieShaker. The video could be a better quality (reference earlier concerns) but so far I like what I see (please disregard the cheesy safety-short music). Click here to view this edited file. Enough already, I'll try again tomorrow.

Filed in: Family Tech Recreation