Movie Making Made Easy
Editing your home movies is easier than ever. Here's a step-by-step guide to get you started.
January 24, 2003
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DVD-recording drives start at about $300 |
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 Watch the Video (RealOne):
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STEP THREE: SAVING AND SHARING When you've finished editing, you'll need to export your movie and render it into a movie file format that your PC or DVD player can read. (The computer will need several minutes or more to do this, so this is a good time to go make yourself a sandwich.)
Which format you choose depends on how you plan to view your movie and how you plan to share it with others. So ask yourself: Do I want to email this movie? Post it on my website? Keep it as a QuickTime Movie on my hard drive? Or burn it onto a video CD or DVD to give to Aunt Ruth?
You'll need a recordable CD drive to burn it onto CD, and a recordable DVD drive to burn it onto DVD. Your computer may come with one of these drives, or you can buy one separately. The drive should come with the necessary recording software, though your movie editing program might also have a Create a Video CD or Create a DVD feature.
Before you invest in an expensive DVD recorder and stock up on blank discs that can go for $1.50 a pop, make sure your DVD player can read homemade DVDs (my three-year-old, no-frills Toshiba DVD player couldn't read the DVD-R that I made, so I had to run over to my neighbors' house to watch it. Their brand new Toshiba laptop played it just fine. And by the way, the picture quality was superb on their 65-inch set!). Check the manual or the manufacturer's website to check your player's compatibility, or check out www.vcdhelp.com. Most players purchased in the last couple of years read either the DVD-R format or DVD+R format or both, if not also the DVD-RW and DVD+RW formats, as well as video CDs (in addition to regular audio CDs).
When you click Export, your editing program will list the format choices, and, hopefully, also guide you on which format is appropriate to which action, listing picture resolutions and frame rates for each. Video CDs with a 700 MB capacity can hold an hourlong movie that's rendered in a standard VCD format (sometimes called MPEG-1), which has a picture quality roughly the same as VHS tape. If you're putting your movie on DVD, you'll need to put it in MPEG-2 format; a DVD-R disc with 4.7 GB of space can hold up to two hours depending on your bit rate. High quality is 8 megabits per second; standard is 4 MBPS. Both will look rich.
For e-mailing clips, you might choose RealVideo, Windows Media Player or QuickTime movie format, because your recipient probably has one, if not all, of these media players already installed on their desktop. Though I'd still warn them that a pretty big file is on the way. And it helps if the person on the other end has a broadband connection. But again, keep it short!
And one final warning: Once you get the hang of this whole process, it's very easy to get carried away. When I first set out to make a great digital home movie, I thought the hardest part would be setting up my equipment and navigating the software. But the hardest part really is knowing when to stop. You could spend one hour or 100 hours working on the same movie, with only marginally better results. I, for one, spent about an hour fiddling with how to stick "The End" into the final scene. Should the words appear above my son's head or below? And I tried about six different fonts before I settled on Georgia. It's a wonder I found enough time to write this story.
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