Supplementary Brief - Video
Unit Brief
Produce a one minute video which tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end.
Proposal
I intend to produce a video about a day in the life of my cat, called Cleo. I choose this as I thought it would be relatively simple to do.
I will take a series of videos, pick the best ones and edit them together using Windows Movie Maker 2.1.
Research
All the material for my project had to be created by myself. I did this using the video function on my digital camera at the highest resolution available to me.
I will disregard all sound I record with the videos and replace it with some relevant music and/or sound effects.
Web sites I found useful:
- About Desktop Video - Lots of tutorials on all the popular digital editing packages. Some good video tutorials too.
- Adobe Video & Audio Primers - Covers the basics of video and audio production.
- Digital Video Editing - A useful web site with lot's of tutorials and articles on digital video editing.
- BBC One Minute Movies - Has lots of one minute movies which other people have made.
Planning
The final piece will be a in the QuickTime .mov format with the dimensions 320 x 240 pixels and be under 1MB. The movie will be placed on my web site and will be viewable from within the user's browser.
The first step I took was to draw a storyboard with the basic structure of my video. This is shown in the sidebar to the right.
After I had taken all the necessary video clips I needed, I split them into individual clips and gave them more meaningful names. I imported them into Windows Movie Maker and placed them in the timeline and adjusted the length of each clip to make them fit into one minute. I then added titles and captions to each clip. I decided not to use any transitions as I felt that they took up quite a bit of time in the video, which I've used instead for showing more content.
When I had finished editing my video I exported it to the Windows Media video format (.wmv) and set the target size to 1MB. However, the requirement was for the video to be in the QuickTime video format (.mov). I used River Past Video Cleaner to convert the Window Media video to QuickTime video. I had to reduce the quality and frame rate in order to try to get the file size to 1MB. I found this very difficult, and only managed to get the file size down to 1.1MB which I believe is still acceptable, especially as the majority of internet users who are likely to view my web site connect using broadband connections.
Final Piece
The final piece is available as a download on the sidebar. As the video had to be under 1MB in size, the quality had to be reduced a lot. I handed the same video and a higher quality version on CD as part of the assessment. I also included the Windows Media versions on the CD, as I thought they were much better quality than the the QuickTime versions, even though they had a smaller file size.
Review
The project went as planned with no major problems. The only problem I had was converting from Windows Media video to QuickTime video and trying to keep the file size below 1MB. I didn't achieve this, but got very close with 1.1MB.
I feel the final video could have been improved if I used more complex software like Adobe Premiere Pro which would have gave me more control over different elements of my video whilst editing. However, I found Adobe Premiere Pro quite hard to use, so I went with Windows Movie Maker as it was a lot simpler.
The project could be developed further with better planning of clips and clip lengths. The background music could coincide more with the content of the individual clips. The background music should also cut off before the start of the next verse, so you don't hear the beginning of it, but it is too late to change it now.
