Posted on: Tuesday, December 4, 2001

Lights, camera, PC

By John Yaukey
Gannett News Service

British band The Electric Soft Parade shows off the cameras members used to quickly and easily make a video with PCs and software.

Three hours and 46 minutes. That's how long it took the British band The Electric Soft Parade to shoot and edit the music video for its new single "There's a Silence'' using an over-the-counter video camcorder and Microsoft's Movie Maker digital video software, which is bundled with Windows XP.

Sure, it was a publicity stunt.

But it also was meant to underscore a point: that home digital movie making is finally ready for its close-up. Thank the convergence of four new technologies:

• New operating systems for both the PC and the Mac are more video-friendly.

• FireWire connections quickly shuttle video between camcorder and the computer.

• Editing software has become affordable.

• Digital camcorders no longer cost a fortune.

Lump all that in with cheap, off-the-shelf computers that come standard with the processor muscle and capacious memory needed to handle digital video and you've got everything it takes to shoot and edit professional-looking digital home movies without being a pro.

"Digital video — home movie-making — has really hit a sweet spot here,'' said Apple Computer's Michael Uy. "It's reached a point where people are starting to say 'I finally get this — I can do this.'"

Indeed, picture this: After shooting holiday footage, you plug your camcorder into your computer via a high-speed FireWire cable, and with a double-click, it's transferred to your PC, where it's ready for easy editing.

Here's what's available for the budding director looking to make a production without making a production out of it.

Hardware

It all begins with the camcorder.

And they've been getting smaller and easier to use, with many now able to correct jerky pictures so shaky hands seem almost as steady as a tripod.

What's more, some of the features you would have paid four digits for are now available for well under $1,000.

"You're seeing a lot of high-quality features going into lower-end camcorders — high- resolution pixel counts, jitter correction and small size,'' said Tom Streeter, director of the Streaming Media Project at the University of Cincinnati. "This is the kind of stuff that used to really cost an arm and a leg.''

The compact JVC GR-DVL310U ($899, jvc.com), for example, comes with a high-resolution 680,000-pixel CCD (charged coupled device). The CCD is a light-sensitive chip that acts like film by capturing the image in the lens on a matrix of photoreceptors or pixels. The primary consideration with the CCD is pixels — the more pixels the clearer the picture.

A year ago, most camcorders in this price range came equipped with CCDs in the 360,000-390,000 pixel range.

For even less, the 460,000- pixel CCD Canon ZR20 ($699, www.canon.com) has some

features that you wouldn't normally see on a budget model, such as a large flip-out color viewfinder. The ZR20's Auto Exposure function automatically adapts to most lighting conditions. The edit "in the camcorder" feature allows you to add digital effects without ever loading the footage on your PC.

The Sony DCR-TRV230 is another bargain-priced model ($699, sony.com). It comes with an ample 460,000-pixel CCD, onboard digital editing tools and Sony's NightShot feature for shooting video in the dark. The Sony camcorder uses a format called Digital 8.

A quick note about standards —there are two: the Mini DV, a nonproprietary standard used by most camcorder makers (including Canon, Panasonic and JVC), and Sony's Digital 8, which is strictly proprietary. There's no appreciable difference in the clarity of the images.

Digital 8 boasts backward compatibility with the old 8-mm and Hi-8 analog videotapes.

Mini DV is strictly digital, but because the format is nonproprietary, there are plenty of companies (including Sony) that sell camcorders that work with this format.

The only other hardware you need is a PC or a Mac that's equipped with a FireWire port and a cable to link your camcorder and computer. Technically, FireWire is the name for the Mac technology, while on the PC side it's called an IEEE-1394 connection or iLink in the case of Sony. Most people, however, refer to it all as FireWire.

One of major benefits with devices that support FireWire is that they understand each other as soon as you connect them, making data transfers a cinch.

For example, when you connect your camcorder to your PC, a window pops up asking if you want to transfer the video footage.

While all Macs and Sony PCs sold today include a FireWire port, it isn't standard equipment on most other computers. You can add a FireWire circuit board, called a "card," easily to the PCI (Personal Computer Interface) slots of almost any PC and even some older Macs.

FireWire cards, which have fallen in price recently, now sell for under $50 from manufacturers such as ADS Technologies (adstech.com), Orange Micro (orangemicro.com) and Western Digital (wdc.com).

As far as PCs go, anything with Pentium III-class processor, 256 megabytes (MB) of memory and a 30 gigabyte (GB) hard drive should be able to handle video editing with ease.

Of course, a new Pentium 4 system works even faster, and they're priced now at historic lows. Dell, for example, was recently offering Dimension 2100-series desktops with a 1.1 gigahertz (GHz) Pentium 4 processor, 256 MB of memory and a 40 GB hard drive — more than ample for handling digital video — for $799.

On the Mac side, iMacs with 600 megahertz (MHz) Power PC processors, 256 MB of memory and 40 GB hard drives — more than ample for handling plenty of digital video footage — run about $1,299.

Software

If you're using one of the two new operating systems — Windows XP (microsoft.com) for PCs and OS X (apple.com) for the Mac — some of the easiest video editing software around is already on your PC or available free for downloading.

Windows Movie Maker (WMM), XP's basic video-editing program, is included with the operating system software and is designed with the novice video maker in mind. In Windows Me, WMM was in the Accessories menu, but in XP, Microsoft has moved it to the Start Menu, next to other major applications such as the Internet Explorer Web browser.

With WMM you can do simple video editing, add music you've ripped from the Web or narration and then play the results on the Windows Media Player multimedia application.

XP's support for CD burning means you can transfer your movie to CD and mail it to family or friends.

"With Movie Maker, you really have everything you need to make a professional-quality video without any expertise needed,'' said Microsoft's David Caulton. "It's highly intuitive.''

If you're looking for more sophisticated editing tools consider Magix video deLuxe ($49.99, magix.com) for the PC. This affordable package comes with a suite of editing features from lens distortions such as "fisheye'' and "blur'' to color effects for creating surreal scenes. It even lets you combine multiple video tracks

in a single movie, which is a feature usually restricted to software costing $1,000 or more.

Sonic Foundry's VideoFactory 2.0 ($59.97, sonicfoundry.com) for the PC also comes highly rated.

On the Mac side, Apple's iMovie 2 software is just as easy to use as Movie Maker, if not more so. Optimized for OS X, iMovie 2 is now included on most new Macs and is also available as a download ($49) from Apple's Web site.

With iMovie 2, it's a cinch to add music and special effects to your digital and footage to create professional-looking transitions between scenes.

If you want to share your videos with family or friends and you have the proper equipment — a G4 processor, a "SuperDrive''

for burning DVDs and Apple's iDVD 2 software (included with SuperDrive-equipped Macs) — you can create a high-resolution DVD of your home movie.