getting to grips with digital video

Goal

to be able to make broadcast quality video from a variety of media which can then be transferred to DVD/VCD and compressed for streaming over the web (to largest possible audience without multiple formats), on a minimal budget.

Current Tools

I have access to:-

• video mode on pentax optio 330gs (no audio)
• super 8 camera
• couple of pentium 3 pc’s (win XP)adobe premiere 6
• windows movie maker
• windows media encoder 9.

Things I have found

I can’t import the Avi files from my pentax directly into Premiere for some reason, but found today that I can import them into windows movie maker and export as Avi (large file sizes) which will import into premiere. I can also convert wmv files to avi this way

Windows movie maker will export to wmv, which works well as a web download and could be used for a windows streaming server source file possibly (not sure exactly what I need here, but know I have the tools for it – I also have an offer of streaming windows hosting. Wmv wont import directly into Adobe premiere 6, see above

I can import most formats into flash MX 2004 and add a preloader – the quality is poor so far, compared to the original wmv files and the file size is larger than the equivalent wmv, but there is a whole world of flash video (flv) progressive and streaming video that I have yet to explore.

I need to vastly improve my knowledge of Premiere – a book is probably in order, or preferably find someone for a skillswap.

mpg files from a dazzle video capture device cannot be opened by windows movie maker or premiere, but I can convert them to wmv via windows media encoder 9, then open them up in windows movie maker (which seperates it out into smaller clips for some reason- you can drag all of these at once to the storyboard to rebuild though)

From what I can see NTSC translates to a frame size of 720 x 480 pixels, PAL translates to 720 x 576