Making Your Video

Before we move on, let's get to a checkpoint. If you are going to work on a video project, you should have done the following:

· Researched current video capture drivers

· Researched video capture boards within your budget

· Acquired (if you don't already have one) a video capture board

· Downloaded and compiled a compatible kernel for the driver

· Downloaded, compiled, and installed a driver for your video capture board

· Downloaded, compiled, and installed applications for your video production process

· Tested the capturing and playback of video

The Gopher

In your production, you have several parts to fill. In addition to producing the video, you might also be the director, the musical talent, or the actor. You are definitely the gopher. On the other hand, you might be lucky and have plenty of friends willing to work for beer or food. Either way, you're in control and in charge. The success of your video project depends greatly on your organizational skills and planning.

As with any project, you need an idea to start things rolling. The idea for my project was to videotape my R/C truck, the Traxxas T-MAXX ( http://www.traxxas.com and http://www.t-maxx.com ), doing all sorts of jumps , crashes, and speed runs while putting the whole thing together with some nifty stills and some kickin' rock-n-roll music. To start my project I created a script of how the video was going to play out, from start to finish.

The Story, Script, Screenplay, Whatever!

Your screenplay or script will be the starting point for your video. My project had no actors and, because I'm not a professional filmmaker, I didn't feel the need to research how a real screenplay should be written. So I came up with what I call a video sequence guide. This is a guide to help me determine in detail the sequence of events thoughout the video. I'm a big fan of "winging it." Figure 24-1 shows a sample of my video sequence guide.

Figure 24-1. Sample video sequence guide.

The basic idea is that you have an idea of what you want to do before you begin shooting video and taking pictures. A video sequence guide will assist you in this. You'll be able to work out what music you want, make notes for yourself for when you're shooting, and be able to work out the timing.

Though such a guide helps keep you organized, it doesn't always give you a good feeling for the visual aspects of your project. This is where the storyboard comes into play.

The Storyboard

The pros do it and so should you. Forget for the moment that your drawing skills might be as poor as mine. The storyboard is your way to make sure your video will come out the way you intend. It will help you focus on camera angles and avoid plot deviations and will serve as a guide as you shoot video footage and prepare graphic images or animations.

There is really nothing Linux specific about this concept ”it's just a good idea to do. As you become familiar with more Linux tools, you might try using them to create the storyboard images. I find it easier to simply scratch out my ideas onto 3 x 5 index cards. I'm no artist, but I get my point across.

Lights, Camcorder, Action!

Once you have an idea of what video you will need, it's time to head to the set and start shooting. For me, the set was the local R/C track. Luckily, the guys at the track were very nice and allowed me to walk all over the track to position my camera in various places for the best shots. Keep track of what video you will need to shoot. Your script and storyboard cards should come in very handy at this point.

When shooting your video, it's always a good idea to have some extra time at the front and end of each take. And it's always a good idea to have at least two takes of each action item. This will give you something to choose from when editing your video clips together. It will also help to build your library of stock footage for future video projects.

Up to this point, I've concentrated on the organization of the video project and getting the video recorded. Now we move on to the next stage: video capture and editing. The specific aspects may be different for you and your project, but you will probably follow the same basic steps for any video project. Before you begin, however, make sure your video production studio is configured properly.

Your Studio Setup

If you already do music production with your Linux system, adding video to the mix is not that difficult. If you only have a set of speakers attached to your computer to listen to MP3 files, then you have a little bit of setup ahead of you. The configuration of your production environment will vary greatly with your needs. My studio consists of mixing equipment, amplifiers , speakers, a TV and VCR, a camera, several synthesizers, and computer speakers . Needless to say, I have cables running all over my computer room/studio (I also have a drum set in the corner). To get basic video and audio into your computer, you need at a minimum a video capture card and a soundcard. You will need to connect your camera to the video-in and audio-in ports on each card. To view your work, you will need to connect the video-out and audio-out ports to the video-in and audio-in ports on your VCR or TV. Figure 24-2 diagrams a simple configuration.

Figure 24-2. Simple studio configuration.

If you plan to perform your own music or have additional audio sources, you might want to add a mixer to your setup. Also, having multiple video sources might come in handy, so a video source and destination switch might be useful. Figure 24-3 presents an example of a more complicated configuration.

Figure 24-3. Complex studio configuration.

Capture Your Video

After spending five hours on a Sunday afternoon at a dusty R/C racing track, I managed to shoot three hours of videotape. Using my video sequence guide and storyboard cards, I was able to record all of the required footage, along with a lot of extra suff for filler and stock footage for future projects. I also got some real nice snapshots using my digital camera. All I had to do was get the video into my computer to be able to "digitally join" everything together.

Using the recording script, vidrec, will help me avoid making endless typos at the command line. For each segment of video shot, I captured the video using the vidrec command, naming each file according to the video sequence guide.

 $ vidrec jump01 60

 $ vidrec jump02 60

lavrec displays status information while capturing the video. It is a good idea to monitor this output to determine if any frames were lost during the recording process. Depending on the hardware and software you choose to use, you may see a much different screen. Figure 24-4 shows the output from one of my capture sessions. As you can see, I've captured 60 seconds of video.

Figure 24-4. Video capture session output.

Once the video is captured, it's time to review it. I created a very simple script, vidplay, that executes the lavplay program and takes a single parameter:

 lavplay -C /clips/.mov

Executing vidplay will play the video file through the frame grabber's video-out connector. If you have this connected to your TV or VCR and have your setup configured correctly, you should be able to see the captured video playing on the TV. Status information from lavplay will be written to the text window where you ran the program. Figure 24-5 presents an example of the playback status of a video file.

Figure 24-5. Video playback session output.

Editing Clips

We're at the part of the project where your creative skills meet up with your technical skills to put together all the peices of video, music, and sound to create your masterpiece. Nonlinear video editing is a relatively simple process. We won't go into the more complex subjects of digital compositing or including graphic animations along with live video, subjects that could fill an entire book. Instead, we will cover the very basics in order to get you over the learning curve and into simple video production with Linux. These include:

· Adding video tracks

· Creating transitions between video tracks

· Adding background music

· Adding voice-over narration

· Creating text titles

For my project, I used Broadcast 2000 for my nonlinear video editing. When I began writing this chapter for the book, Broadcast 2000 was available as a GPL product. This is no longer true. In fact, the product is currently not available to anyone . The owners claim "excessive liability" as their reason for pulling the product. So where does that leave us for nonlinear video editing software? A good and inexpensive commercial alternative to broadcast 2000 is MainActor from MainConcept ( http://www.mainconcept.com/products/mainactorLinux.shtml ). Considering this book is about Free Software, I have reluctantly included this plug for MainActor because it is currently the only low-cost alternative to Broadcast 2000.

Timeline

To get started, you will be presented with a timeline onto which video clips will be added. These clips are the files you captured onto your hard disk. The timeline represents the time for a video clip. You are able to move your cursor to any point in time within the clip and play the video or make adjustments to its parameters ( Figure 24-6 ).

Figure 24-6. Video clip timeline concept.

Transitions

In between each clip, you will be able to add transitions. Transitions create a smooth bond between two different video clips. Without transitions, video clips simply run from one to the next with a sudden switch. Sometimes, this is the desired effect and that's okay. But sometimes you want to emphasize the change from one video clip to another, and for this you use transitions. A transition can be thought of as a special video clip that goes between two clips you want join together. Figure 24-7 is a diagram illustrating the basic idea behind a transition.

Figure 24-7. Video clip transition concept.

The key point to remember is that transitions take time from each end of the two clips you want to join. They require time from the end of the first clip and the beginning of the next clip. Allow for this when shooting and capturing your video. Once you are more familiar with the transitions, you'll get the timing down and you'll be able to work the transitions into your video sequence guide from the beginning, complete with time requirements.

Once you've connected the video clips together, it's time to get some music into your video.

Voice-Overs and Music

Voice-overs can make or break a video project. Use them sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. Voices-overs can add to a video when the subject matter is not entirely understood or when a story is being told and narration is required. Otherwise, it's best just to have really good music in the background.

Music is used all the time in movies to establish a particular tone or to invoke a particular feeling. The same can be accomplished in your videos . For my T-Maxx Fever video I used two songs I felt brought out the feelings I wished to invoke in my audience. Adding music is as simple as adding a video clip to your project. Generally, you will add either a WAV file or an MP3 file, depending on what the editor application supports. The music will be displayed on the timeline, along with the video clips and transitions, and it should show the waveform image as a guide for aligning the music to the video or the video to the music, whichever is needed.

Once the music is synced to the video, all that's left is to title your work and to create the final video file.

Titles

Titling a video is your one chance to say, "Hey, this is mine!" Titling is your way of communicating to your audience that what they are about to see or have just seen was made by you. It gives credit where credit is due. It also gives you a chance to come up with a nifty production company name (mine is Evil Penguin Productions). Have fun with your titling, or at least let those viewing know the name of your video.

Titling usually involves adding text or a still-image file with text to the timeline before, after, or during video clips. Play with the various transitions between your text images to get some fancy titling, like the big guys in Hollywood.

Final Rendering

The final step in your project will be to render your video, complete with music, transitions, voice-overs, and titles, to a single AVI, Quicktime, or MPEG-1/2 file, depending on what the editor application supports. Regardless, you should be able to convert your video to a different format once you've rendered your project in one of these formats.

Commercial Music

If you intend to make a video that will be for anything other than private use, it is a good idea to employ music that you create yourself or have purchased the rights to. I've included examples of songs from very well known artists . I am doing this without their permission or without compensating them for the use of their songs. If I were going to sell this video, I'd have to get permission or send them lots of money. Since I have neither , I'll stick to playing the video in the comfort of my home and only for my friends.

But what about our goal? What about getting our video on TechTV? For that, I swapped out the Rush and George Thorogood songs for a couple of my own, just in case TechTV objected. This also helps promote my own music and keeps the lawyers off my back.