Putting video to the test
Last night, far later than I should have started such a project, I threw together the pieces of Medkat’s wedding that I shot on the P.o.S. camera I have. I cringe when I look at the graphic quality (and my lack of tripod), but the audio was pretty priceless.
So even though this was a very dirty project (as in, I wanted to give them one clip to watch instead of having to open each one up separately), I ended up tweaking the audio so they could hear their own vows and no one got blown away by applause, and as long as I was there, removing what pops and clicks I could.
By the time I was done, of course, I’d thrown in flashes to white and audio dissolves, put up an intro graphic, and put far more thought than I intended into it. *chuckle* It was 3:30 in the morning, and it’s time to go to bed.
So… I start prepping to render out a video for the first time on my new computer in Premiere CS4. I struggled for a moment until it downloaded the proper codecs, and then found out it now has a “queue” feature.
What’s that mean? It means I can tell it to render out an Mpeg video and THEN an h.264 video (a la youtube and the like) and whatever else I could think of… and go to bed!
I didn’t go to bed though, because I wanted to see if it really would follow through with the crazy times it was telling me.
See, on the “spare-no-expense-five-years-ago” laptop I previously had at home, and the “spare a little expense, but still very nice 2 years ago” desktop at work, rendering an Mpeg video would take… oh, perhaps 3 or 4 times the length of the video (an hour and ten minutes = 4 hours, more likely five).
Total time to render the mpeg last night? 35 minutes.
And it was true to its word. I may have peed a little. It was that cool.
Honestly, nothing has made me so interested in actually doing -work- at home (and believe me, I have a million video projects I’ve procrastinated on) as seeing those numbers. It also validated my purchase decision – I put together my own PC from parts I chose (it’s been a good six years since I’ve done that), and it is fast in very useful ways.
Squee.
That is totally awesome!
From my days of yore before I got a corporate job and started working for the man, I still get emails every now and again from companies that I saw when I went to the NAB convention eons ago. There is a post production workshop coming up in Mt Pleasant, MI in October, and it has a variety of different workshops for different editing suites. If you don’t already know about it, do a search for Postapalooza 2009, and pick the Cleverscope link. They are the ones putting it on.
You’re excited? I’m ecstatic! Thank you, so much!