Handycam man

I originally posted this article on A Baby In Bermuda, but in the hope that some LiB readers may have experience editing video files, I decided to put it up here too.

Until Aidan came along, I had never felt the need to own a video camera. Still photography was more my thing. Even so, it didn’t take much for Mandy to persuade me that it would be nice to have some video of our son to look back on in future years. My dad took lots of cine film – and later, video – when I was growing up, and I have fond memories of watching it on the old-fashioned projector and collapsible screen that he’d set up in the living room.

I spent a good part of last Sunday figuring out which camera to buy. Not knowing anything about video cameras, it took me a while to learn about the different varieties (MiniDV, DVD or hard-drive? Hi-def or standard?) and decide which model to go for. In the end I plumped for a Sony Handycam DCR-SR100 – a standard-definition camcorder with a 30GB hard drive. It still seems to be early days for the hi-def models, with some of the recording formats not yet widely supported by editing tools, and I wanted to avoid any unnecessary pain.

The camera arrived on Friday; I spent the weekend learning how to use it. It’s pretty intuitive, and it wasn’t long before I was shooting footage of Aidan and Saturday evening’s Christmas Boat Parade. Downloading the movie files to the PC was easy enough, but when it came to playback and editing, I found things much more difficult than I was expecting.

Not wanting to have to view my movies with the crappy player software that came with the camera, the first thing I did was try to open them in Windows Media Player (WMP). Alas, every time I tried, WMP would crash. I soon discovered that my camera saves its files in MPEG-2 format (the same format that DVDs use), and that WMP doesn’t come with a MPEG-2 codec (the software that allows it to play MPEG-2 files). Worse, because the MPEG-2 format is licenced, if you want to get one, you have to pay for it.

After spending too long searching around for a free MPEG-2 codec that WMP could use, I eventually gave up and stumped up $20 for one of the “approved” ones listed on Microsoft’s site. After installing it, however, WMP was still crashing, although it seemed to be getting further than before. I downloaded a small application that scans your machine for MPEG-2 codecs and tells you whether they’re compatible with WMP. Sure enough, it found the codec I had purchased, but it seemed to think that it wasn’t compatible. Gritting my teeth, I eventually tried turning off the “Download codecs automatically” option in WMP, and then my movies played fine. Hurrah.

The next problem was editing. My editing requirements are pretty basic: I need to be able to trim clips, throw in a few transitions and perhaps add a background music track. For that I was expecting to be able to use Windows Movie Maker 2 (MM), which came pre-installed on the PC. However, I quickly discovered that MM has difficulty dealing with MPEG-2 video and conversion to avi format is suggested first. Fine, I thought, I’ll just download an application that can convert MPEG-2 to avi.

Easier said than done. After some more time on Google, I came across something called VirtualDubMod which suggested it could do what I wanted, although I had to download another video codec to do so. I followed some instructions that I’d found for doing the conversion, but the avi file that resulted had lost its sound. When I couldn’t figure out what was going on, I decided to find another converter. Something called Super Converter sounded promising, with its support for a bewildering array of video and audio formats. Try as I may, however, I couldn’t get it to work.

I changed tack, and decided to look for some editing software that could work with my MPEG-2 files directly. I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Premiere Elements 3, but then found a forum post suggesting that it has problems with MPEG-2 files as well. The solution? Once again, convert to avi first.

By now I was getting thoroughly hacked off. I wasn’t trying to do anything fancy. Why couldn’t any of the editing packages handle MPEG-2 properly, and why was there no simple conversion program - free or otherwise - that I could download?

I went back to VirtualDubMod and furrowed my brow. I noticed that there was no audio when I used it to play the original file too. I wondered if I was missing the codec it needed to play the audio. I used a utility called GSpot to check what encoding the file was using (AC-3 ACM), then used Google to find a codec. Once I’d installed it, VirtualDubMod played the audio fine, and the exported avi file had audio too. About bloody time.

After that, things got easier. MM worked with the exported avi files, allowing me to edit the video I’d shot earlier. I was then able to export the edited movie in wmv format and upload to YouTube. You can see the results here.

Some lingering problems remain. The exported avi files play OK in WMP but sometimes stutter once included in a MM timeline. And I have yet to find an application than can take my wmv file and export it to the 320x240 resolution MPEG-4 file with MP3 audio that YouTube prefers.

The complexity of this process contrasts unfavourably with what’s involved in resizing a still photo for upload to the web. Does it really have to be this difficult?

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