analog to digital

I was asked by my niece to assist with a video she was creating for a class assignment (8th grade) last week. Flattered, I of course agreed. It has been a few months since I last touched my MacG4 and iMovie but I was looking forward to helping her learn what it is capable of. She is already familiar with MovieMaker2, I showed her how to use it to make a photo slideshow last month. A 15 minute step-by-step example using her photos and she was up and running. My confidence was rewarded when she showed me a 'congratulations & farewell' slideshow she created for her best friend who was recently accepted into an IB program here in town.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is the calm before the storm. Turns out that the host family for the production work only has an analog camcorder despite having every other toy an upper middle class family in this town wants including a new super SUV. So four girls show up at my loft on a Friday evening with the expectation that in 30-60 minutes they would walk out the door with a finished DVD. Ouch! I start casting about for a solution and think of the 9600 All-in-Wonder card I installed last fall. Turns out there is an AV-in option and luckily I find the external adapter without too much trouble (I just moved into a new office space). The first problem I run into is that the connector (S-video like) has bent pins and won't work.

I then remember that another alternative I've read about is using a digital camcorder as a converter. There is only a single audio out port but I am able to connect a two-wire RCA cable from the Sony analog to my Sony PDX-10 and start capturing. Wait a minute, rather then capturing to miniDV tape in Recorder mode, it's capturing to my Memory Stick card. Well, that works OK except that now I have MPEG2 and guess what, iMovie won't work with MPEG2. So I move over to my XP machine and open up MovieMaker2. We start transfering to a new collection but I have to do it in a couple of transfers since my Memory Stick isn't large enough to capture the entire 12 minutes of video they have. When I load the Memory Stick for the second transfer, my original transfer has been corrupted. Well, by now it's been over two hours and ice cream only goes so far towards calming teenage girls and the parents are waiting to pick them up as well. I suggest I have some more homework to do and my niece volunteers to come to my place later that weekend to complete the editing once I have done my part. Everyone heads home and I start digging in.

Using MovieMaker2, the first thing to do is to transfer all video files to your computer. The software only creates links to the original files and that is what corrupted my earlier efforts - when I removed the Memory Stick the files went with. Once I loaded the captured video into a folder my niece was able to edit. The next problem we ran into is something I experienced last spring when I first tried to help a soccer mom with her video problems. MM2 doesn't have DVD burning capabilities, a 3rd party product is required. I thought I had that covered thanks to the new dual layer Sony DVD burner I'd installed over the holidays. The Nero software that gets such good reviews wanted me to use their editing tools however, which meant starting over. This is Sunday afternoon and my niece is ready to get home to her Dad's as is her older brother who is responsible for squiring her around that afternoon. I send them on their way and dig in again.

I ended up taking two seperate paths to completing the video. First, I attached my PDX-10 to the XP system and transfered the MM2 video to DV tape. That required a 90 minute rendering effort for a 10 1/2 minute video (!). Once that was complete, I transfered what is now a 3rd generation rendering (analog to MPEG2 to DV) to iMovie and burnt a DVD. There were other difficulties related to the rendering, including dropping frames, so the quality was poor but it did represent my nieces editing efforts which were good. She used titles and transitions to improve the production which from a content standpoint was excellent. The girls really did a good job on presenting the story of the Suffrage Movement and it's key characters.

The final path I took was working on my All-in-Wonder card until I could get the connector to attach to the card. I once again captured the analog video to the Video Recorder in a better quality 480x720 pixel compressed file. Once that was done, I transfered it to my PDX-10 which allowed me to use it with iMovie. I recreated my nieces titleing efforts and added one transition near the end that she hadn't used and it was time to send it to iDVD.

Anyone interested in seeing the result of that effort can visit http://homepage.mac.com/steveoleolson/ . Not bad for over ten hours of labor eh?

Bottom line - when my niece asked me before production began if I would be able to help them I did not sit down with her and discuss the details. I assumed I would have DV to work with and it would be a straightforward editing effort. Don't assume a thing!