In the last column (NPT, August, 2001), why it makes financial sense to produce your own promotional video, distributing it on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM discs was explored. We also went through the first step of storyboarding the video were also outlined. This task involves sketching out on paper what each scene in your finished video encompasses, and serves as a scripting a shooting guide.

Now its time to discuss some of the hardware that will be necessary for the project. The following column or two will detail the requisite software, as well as the process of shooting the video, getting it into your personal computer (PC), editing it, and recording the finished video onto the desired media.

Thank You Mr. Kodak

While professional film-makers still shoot on film, this media really isn’t practical for your purpose. Videotape is a lot less expensive to buy and use, is recyclable and reusable if you don’t like the way the scene turned out. And, it is a lot easier to edit than the film-based alternative. Plus, there’s no waiting for film to be developed -- just shoot and view.

The choice that needs to be made is whether to use an analog video camera or a digital model. There are pros and cons to either choice.

Many organizations, or at least someone in the nonprofit, will already have an analog camcorder. The most common types are 8MM and VHS-C. These are quite serviceable for the task at hand, but require a different approach as far as capturing the video into digital format.

Digital camcorders are becoming quite common. These use MiniDV tape cartridges that look similar to, but are not compatible with the analog 8mm tapes. Digital camcorders capture images with greater resolution and clarity. That’s not, however, the main reason they are more suitable for our promotional video project.

Where a digital camcorder earns its somewhat premium price is in the ease in which the video can be downloaded to a PC. Almost every digital camcorder has a special interface port called an IEEE-1394 or FireWire port. Not only is download speed through this port many times faster than through a serial or USB connection, but it is two-way.

With the right software installed on your PC, you can control the camcorder from your PC, rewinding and fast-forwarding to the desired portions of the tape. An analog camcorder requires a video capture card be installed in your PC. The tape that you’ve shot is downloaded, en mass, to the PC’s hard disk. When all of the tape has been downloaded, you can then start to edit it.

Once captured, either analog video or digital video will need to be edited and converted to a type of file called an MPEG-2 file. MPEG-2, which refers to the Motion Picture Expert Group standard that defines it, is a way of storing video files so that they use less space.

Standard computer video files, usually in the AVI file format, can take up to a megabyte of disk space per second of video. MPEG-2, on the other hand, can store several hours of video on a 4.7GB DVD disc. It can also easily accommodate five to 10 minutes of edited video and sound on a standard CD-R disc that you can burn in any PC equipped with a CD-RW drive.

It is, of course, really easy to get carried away and spend thousands of dollars on a camcorder. Considering the intent of this series, to produce an inexpensive alternative to several-dollar-per-copy promotional videotapes, spending this much on one component is counterproductive unless you intend to produce quite a few of these promotions in the next year or so.

You can due quite nicely with a Canon ZR-25. This is a modestly priced (about $800) digital camcorder that’s small enough to fit in a coat pocket. Even with its small size, the ZR-25 still has some ritzy features such as optical zoom and image stabilization for those times when you can’t mount the camcorder on a tripod. It has a large-capacity rechargeable battery, so we can easily shoot up to an hour of tape before needing to switch batteries or recharge. Similar camcorder models are available from Sony, JVC, RCA, Samsung, and Sharp.

Gotcha!

The type of camcorder that you use will dictate the type of hardware that will be necessary to capture the video to your hard disk. Video editing does not require the use of a monster PC, but it is compute-intensive enough to benefit from lots of computing power where available.

What you will need is large hard disk drive. Figure on at least 6GB to 10GB of space at a minimum. If you don’t have this much free space, consider buying a second hard drive for your PC. At the time this is being written, a 40GB Maxtor 7,200-RMP ATA/100 drive is selling for $130 in several computer stores and office superstores. That’s large enough to easily hold several video projects.

Capturing analog video isn’t difficult, but most PCs aren’t set up to do this task. There are any number of inexpensive video capture devices available through mail-order or in computer stores. The problem is that most of the ones that sell for $100 or less simply can’t keep up with the 30 frames per second frame rate that standard video is shot in. The result is that frames are dropped during the capture process, resulting in jerky video.

Another problem with inexpensive capture devices is resolution. While a high-performance video capture unit can grab 30 frames per second of video at 720 x 480 resolution, you’ll be lucky to get 640 x 480 resolution from the less expensive models.

To capture analog video at a decent frame rate and resolution, you’ll need to add hardware to your PC. One approach is to add a video capture card. You can purchase just a stand-alone video capture card, or you can buy a multi-purpose card, such as ATI Technology’s ALL-IN-WONDER. Priced from about $150 to $300, depending on the graphic chipset being used and the amount of video memory on the card, these boards offer a TV tuner, personal digital video recorder, and a variety of analog video inputs and outputs. Another way to capture analog video is with a specialized capture device. Dazzle Multimedia’s Digital Video Creator II is a combination of add-in PCI card and external connection box. At $299, it’s not inexpensive, but does offer excellent capture rates, video editing software, and software to encode the edited video into MPEG-2 files.