| Friday, March 29, 2002 |
11:48 - Movie Magic
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/business/1321849
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You know how people always say "Macs are better for multimedia, video editing, DVD creation, blah blah blah", and how PC users will sort of wave their hands each time they hear it and go "Yeah, yeah, gimme a break-- a computer's a computer"? Or as the guy Lileks argued with a few days ago, "Who would want to do that?" Well, you know what? It isn't all just marketing bluster. It isn't just subjective PR by devoted Mac-heads trying to retain legitimacy. It's for real, guys.
Just this morning I finished my second major video project-- the distillation of the footage I took at Sierra-at-Tahoe during our ski vacation this past weekend. I incorporated some previous pieces from the trip we took three weeks earlier, and all told it came out to about 35 minutes of fully edited and (hopefully) watchable video, with music and sound effects and fades and titles and transitions.
I'd never worked with iMovie before I got my camcorder for my birthday (Lance, Drew, Dusty-- you guys rock!)-- well, except to do that stupid little "All Your Base" parody with Star Trek clips, which is definitely not what iMovie is primarily designed for. I'd always just sort of had it sitting there on my computer, languishing, gathering pixel dust. Movie-making just seemed to be sort of pointless-- too middle-American for me, or something. Too "trendy" rather than "geeky", like cell phones and pagers, as Chris puts it.
But now that I've tried it and seen how it all works, I understand.
The last time I spent any significant time with home videos was when my family's Sony Handycam traveled with us on every vacation, to every Little League game, to every band concert-- and because it was one of those rogue 8mm cameras, using those little tapes that wouldn't play directly in your VCR (unlike the rest of the world, who used giant shoulder-mounted VHS camcorders), I was pressed into service like the 13-year-old geek-who-wouldn't-be-left-out-of-any-technological-challenge I was. I took it upon myself to copy the 8mm tapes onto VHS so we could watch them, or alternately to set up the camcorder so it could be used for direct playback (when we got tired of making VHS copies, watching them once, and then having them sit in the cabinet forever).
Going back still further, the first time the Tiemanns did video at all was when I was ten, in 1986-- my parents rented a camcorder (hah!) to tape my birthday party. Why the Krabappel-esque "hah"? Weeeeell, because the "camcorder" consisted of a more-or-less full-sized VCR (and remember, this was back when VCRs would have a hard time fitting into 19-inch server racks) in a padded shoulder-bag, connected via RCA cables to the "camera" attachment-- it looked like a little hairdryer. It was really just a hand-grip, some controls, and a lens assembly; the video recording stuff was all handled in the giant box slung over your shoulder. Talk about state-of-the-art! We recorded our house, just pointless little shots of nothing in particular-- and I fondly remember how the phone rang while we were taping, and so later when we were playing it back, we heard the phone ring and someone jumped up to get it. Wooow! I guess the audio was really something-- or else it was just culture shock, like when the Roanoak Indians first saw the British settlers drawing portraits of them. It's evil, I tells ya! Eeeeevil!
And then we watched Flight of the Navigator and Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
Oh yeah, fast-forward. The Handycam, which we bought two or three years later, was an amazing leap forward in technology. Not only was it a single, hand-held unit-- but unlike those VHS cameras, it could be literally held up by one hand, rather than balanced on a shoulder. It had a big carrying case, but the camera could be concealed under a jacket (if you were skinny and the jacket had been stolen from Fat Albert). The hand-grip doubled as the container for the fist-sized battery, which slid into it and locked into place with a satisfying snick-- and then the hand-grip piece clicked onto the body of the camera. I loved that. I thought it was ingenious. And I dreamed of a day when the hand-grip piece would be all there was to the camera-- when camcorders would be that impossibly small.
Well, that day is here, with the advent of digital-video camcorders, their teeny-tiny little DV tapes, and their Tic-Tac-box-sized Li-ion batteries, their flip-out LCD panels, and the general miniaturization of pretty much everything. The Canon ZR20 that I have is sort of the bottom-end of consumer camcorders, but it's pretty sweet nonetheless-- it has more features than I can shake a stick at, takes very nice-looking video, and-- as I'm finding more and more each day-- lets me do more things than I had ever considered to be compelling.
See, with the Handycam, all the video went straight to tape. There was no "editing". There wasn't a really good way to do it, not with analog tapes. Unless you had a multiple-deck VCR with a high-precision manual jog, so you could stitch clips together while attempting to minimize those screenfuls of jagged snowy lines that marked every scene transition, it really wasn't possible to cut out footage you didn't want or add audio tracks or (unheard-of!) apply transitions or video effects. And even if you did have such equipment, you'd still be making second- and third-generation copies of the analog signal, degrading it and the tapes (both source and destination) at the same time. So we just sort of tried to edit while we taped-- only recording what we thought looked important at the time. And I'm sure it forced us to become better video photographers, but still it was pretty miserable. It just wasn't worth the hassle to try to do it the "right" way.
But today... well, everything's different in Digital Land. First of all, the signal doesn't degrade when you transfer it. It's digital. So you can import the video from the camera, edit it, print it back to camera, import it again, edit it more-- it doesn't lose any clarity. The tapes still eventually wear out, which is a shame (tape technology has come a long way, and tapes still hold butt-loads more data than any other medium, but they still do degrade after a certain amount of use). But that takes a lot of use before it happens, and in the meantime the picture is archival-clear, high-resolution, and devoid of all those stupid horizontal white streaks that always crackled across the screen on tapes shot on our Handycam. Remember those, Mom?
It gets better. It gets so much better. You record footage with wild abandon, because the battery lasts forever, the camera fits into an inner coat pocket, and it turns on in a snap. For crying-out-loud, I was taping all weekend while skiing-- holding my poles in one hand and keeping the camera pointed downhill with the other as I swooshed down Intermediate slopes with ice patches and moguls. If I'd tried that with the Handycam, I'd have lost my balance and smashed the camera open on a rock before we even got off the bunny hill. And each time you record a new clip-- this part I just love-- it marks the scene transition on the tape, along with the other digital information (like when it was recorded, under what conditions, etc.) ...so that when you import it into "your video editing program" (--okay, who are we kidding-- into iMovie), it automatically senses when each shot begins and creates a new clip in your palette. So after you've come home, rewound the tape, plugged in the FireWire cable (sorry, USB2.0, the industry's entrenched already-- nyah!), and pressed Import, your only remaining step is to wait until it's finished dumping the data into the computer. It's not just a single continuous data stream, it's what amounts to a self-contained DV file for each time you've pressed Record. And they're all there, ready for you to start dragging them into the timeline and making a movie.
You could just take all the clips, put them in order, and say you're done. You could. But why? It's such a simple matter to throw out clips you don't want, to split clips into smaller chunks so you can edit out pieces that don't "watch well", to put them in a different order-- and that's just for starters. Want to add an audio track? Grab an MP3 and drag it into the audio channel. Then slide the begin and end tabs so it matches up with the video, and use checkboxes to fade it in and/or out and adjust the relative volume. Pin it to the video at a certain point so it doesn't lose its position if you rearrange the video. Want to cross-fade two clips? Go to the list of Transitions, grab the Cross-Fade one, and drag it between the two clips and let it render for a few seconds. And that's it. Titles? Same deal-- select the format for how they'll appear, type in your text, and drag it into place.
Oh, and incidentally, Apple has provided about 1.3GB of music clips from FreePlay, public-domain music for all purposes that's been pre-cut into 15, 20, 30, 60, and 120-second clips (each fully realized with intros and endings, not just chopped to fit). There are genres like "Sports Extreme", "Washingtonian", "Acid Jazz", "Hard Rock", and "World Music"-- each volume with as many as dozens of really good themes. Apple has put it on everybody's iDisk so they can download the clips and put 'em into their iMovies. I did, and now my skiing video has an almost continuous soundtrack. Picking out the perfect music for a particular piece of video is one of the most sublime joys of the editing process-- especially the fact that when you drop it in, it simply blends the music with whatever audio track and sound effects are already there, whether in the other audio channel or embedded into the video itself. No need to worry about audio getting inadvertently lost or replaced-- it just works.
Then, when you're done, export it back to the camera (which it handles just about as seamlessly and unconfusingly as you could want) so you can hook it up to a TV and show your grandparents. Or export it to a QuickTime movie using any of the ~20 available codecs. (A 15-minute video using Sorensen 3 at Low quality, which is really very watchable, comes out to about 40MB.) Or export it as a pristine-quality DV file, suitable for taking into iDVD and burning onto a disc for your family.
It's not like this is just an evolutionary change in how home video works. This is such an astronomical leap in what the home user is able to do that the entire concept of video editing is all new to most people. (It certainly was to me.) My preconceptions made me think of wrestling with cables, pushing little buttons with split-second timing, guessing a lot, and hoping a lot. But it's nothing like that. It's more like making a picture in Painter: all the tedious crap like mixing colors, managing transparency, handling layers, and developing the brush tools you need is all done for you, so 100% of your time is spent in being artistic.
Now, let's compare this with Windows Movie Maker, or whatever other options are available on the PC. First off, WMM doesn't seem to allow you to export video back to the camera-- only to WMV format. It doesn't allow lossless editing-- if you make a change to a clip, it's permanent. You can't back it out and go back to the original media, like you can with iMovie. If you render a title or transition, there's no going back. Because Windows can't guarantee that you'll have FireWire, it bases its assumptions around USB-- which means everything is slow, clunky, redundant, and error-prone. (I doubt you can use the playback-control buttons in WMM to control the camera itself, like you can in iMovie.) It has a time line and a scrubber bar and a clip palette and a viewing window, just like iMovie-- but it's so obviously an bad attempt at checkbox-ism that those reviewers who have looked at it in any detail have dismissed it out of hand rather than bothering to describe it (see David Coursey's take on it at ZDNet for an example). It's enough to make the "Designed for Windows XP" badge on the ZR20 product page look just that much more like the shameless piece of meaningless Microsoft-sponsored propaganda that it is.
And further, take this account in the Houston Chronicle (it's where the link waaaay up at the top of this post goes):
Now allow me to reintroduce my neighbor, Dave (not his real name), whom you first met in my Sept. 22, 2000, column.
When my neighbor saw my iMovies, he immediately ordered a board and software that he said would let him do that on his PC. I told him he should get a Mac. A month ago I asked him how his moviemaking was coming. He looked properly chagrined as he said, "I haven't figured out how to make it work yet."
I lent him the new iMac for a few days and issued a challenge. Since he still, 18 months later, had not completed a single movie project on his Dell, I told him to try making a movie, an audio CD and a DVD on this iMac. And to make things interesting, I offered him no assistance or support -- I told him to look in Mac Help if he had questions.
Three days later I interviewed Dave.
On the first day, he unpacked the iMac, set it up in five minutes and burned two audio CDs with iTunes. He said he never needed to refer to Mac Help and that this whole project was "no problem whatsoever."
On the second day, he used iDVD to create a pair of slide shows using existing digital photos and burned his first DVD. I watched it later, and it didn't stink. In fact, most people would no doubt find it impressive. (I'm so jaded.)
On the third day, he borrowed my Canon ZR-25 camcorder and a tape of my son's last basketball game. I handed him the camera, manual and FireWire cable, and told him he was own his own.
By the end of the day he had imported raw footage into iMovie, edited it, added music and titles, then burned it onto a DVD with iDVD.
As I scribbled furiously, Dave's long-suffering wife added, "He swore less at the Mac than he does at his Dell."
Dave then said he had created more multimedia in three days with the iMac than he had in 18 months with his Dell. He only opened the Help file a couple of times. He concluded, "The hardest part was getting the iMac back in the box."
Before departing I asked if he'd consider a Mac next time. He replied: "Absolutely. In fact, if we hadn't wasted so much money trying to transform that Dell into a multimedia computer, I'd get one today."
And we're hearing more and more of these kinds of testimonials. All it takes is for someone to try it, and their preconceptions that "a computer is a computer" evaporate. I don't know what brainstorm it was in Steve Jobs' cranium several years ago to invest so heavily in making the Mac into the premier multimedia editing platform, back before such things had even been considered for the consumer market, but it's paid off mega-big-time. It's certainly saved the Mac from extinction-- it's kept Apple ahead of the pack.
And anybody who hears about video editing and says "Who would ever want to do that?" simply has not tried it. Or has not tried it on a Mac.
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