Intermediate files for video production

I’m actually glad to have this problem. What has happened today as I have been working with a class that is doing a video assignement. I’ve blogged before on how the storyboard and the shotlist is so important to video production the classroom. But today what happened was that there were students who shot on a Sony DVD camcorder, so their files needed conversion (annoying but doable) and another group of students that had taken a chunk of video from a DVD and then put it on a DVD of their own. This is great! That there are students out there in the undergrad education program (I know I’m going a bit overboard on it, but after many students not even knowing how to do PowerPoint, this is refreshing) who are able to manipulate media. The problem is (and I know this is partially mine, for not mentioning it to them, but it’s still something that others will run into) that many times students will find video that they want to use in a program in wma or rm format, neither of which are easy to edit (especially on the Mac). In order to edit those they must be converted or screen captured (Captivate or a range of other screen capture utilities are out there that will capture video in a window) and then converted to DV. The same goes for AVI files, as these are often coded with a Windows specific codec and if they can be played on a Mac, will only play the sound using an application like VLC.

Fortunately, for me this time, all the files that needed to be changed over to a Quicktime format were convertable, including one that was in WMV, that I used Flip For Mac to convert to DV.

So the end story for everyone out there thinking of using video on it’s own or part of a digital storytelling piece. Be sure to have either the facilities to convert various froms of video to the format that your editing software works in, or be sure to tell your students what file formats are “allowed/blessed” for the project – that way you’ll save yourself much headache and time. As a general rule QuickTime and related formats are the way to go unless you are using Windows Movie Maker and in that case, you want to use MPEG2 or a Windows Media format, or possible AVI.