Spring is here - time to start your cameras

My first home video of the year is of my son's band concert! He's a drummer, and if I do say so myself, he rocks!




This was, of course, recorded with my Samsung SC-MX20. All the settings were set to "auto", except the white balance, it was set to "Tungsten". Resolution was set to "TV Super Fine" and 16:9 widescreen was on. "Antishake" was also on, but I used a tripod, so it didn't have much to do.

It took about 10 minutes to transfer the MP4 files from the camera to the computer.

Since I wanted to edit the video using Windows Movie Maker, I ran everything through "The Fix". About one gig of video (23 minutes) took 25 minutes to re-encode on a Windows Vista computer with only 1 gig of memory. The settings I used were the widescreen fix and deinterlace options. Also had to resync the audio, since it comes out out-of-sync on Vista by .035 seconds. Still not perfect, but good enough.

On Windows Movie Maker, I cut out everything but the music and some applause, that edited everything down to about 12 minutes. I only used "fade in" and "fade out" transitions and had to cut the final product in half to make two videos due to YouTube's limitations. It was about a half hour of me messing around.

To publish, I used the "DVD widescreen" option; it most closely matched the original without re-interlacing. Each half took about 20 minutes to encode. The final result is 480p, which YouTube used to call "High Quality" or "HQ".

I sent each half to YouTube, upload time was about 20 for each half.

Total: 2 hours, 5 minutes for 12 minutes of video. I'm sure the time could be greatly reduced on a better computer with faster Internet. But the final result is pretty good for a home video. The sound is better on the before-YouTube video than it is online.

Overall, I'm really happy with how things come out using The Fix and Windows Movie Maker. I hear all the time about "you lose quality when you re-encode" and "Windows Movie Maker uses lossy codecs", but honestly, I can't see any difference between the original as it plays on the camera, and the final product that comes out of Windows Movie Maker. (It loses some when you upload to YouTube, but such is the nature of the technology.)

In fact, here is a sample of the original for you to compare, in it's squished, interlaced glory:



To my eye, the color is actually a little more vibrant and the contrast is a little deeper AFTER The Fix and Windows Movie Maker. What do you think?