Video
Why video & computers?
It started more than four years ago when I wanted to do a better editing job with my home videos than copying from camera to VCR and trying to press the pause and go buttons at the right moment.
After looking around for computer-driven edit controllers, and realising the anything more than a toy was going to cost a lot of money, I discovered the world of non-linear video editing. The idea of digitising video footage to hard-disk, playing around with it, then recording the result back to tape was appealing. Being a software engineer I saw it as an interesting challenge, and as I needed a new computer anyway it was not going to be too expensive either.
So I equipped myself with a powerful computer - Cyrix 166 with a second 2.5 GB hard drive for video, added an ISA video capture card (a Reveal “Video Artist” which is a Fast F60 under a different brand) - and set to work learning how to use it.. That was a pretty high spec. computer at the time (haven't things changed?), but proved to be only just capable of handling digitised video at 1MB/sec, around VHS quality.
It was a baptism by fire, because not only was it a case of squeezing every ounce of performance from the computer, but of learning all the finer points about video, digitised formats, how to use the editor, how to make results look right, etc. Manuals were limited, and not many other people knew much about the subject.
I nonetheless managed to produce a reasonable result from various pieces of family video, as well as recording and editing one or two stage performances by the local school PTA. When the excellent Computer Video magazine appeared in late 1997 I seized on it, and after writing a letter to the editor ended up being asked to write articles for it.
Having spent a lot of time unravelling the mysteries of Ulead's MediaStudio Pro video editing package, from the 16-bit version 2.0 onwards, I wrote a tutorial that was published in the magazine and is also available from this site.
A lot has changed in a short time. Keeping up with ever-faster hardware has been mind blowing, and now DV camcorders and Firewire ports are commonplace and cheap, as are stunningly fast processors and huge disk drives. Video editing on a PC is becoming about as routine as using a scanner or digital still camera.
Even so, there's still more to it than meets the eye, so if anything on this site helps you get good results with a shorter learning curve than it took me, it will be worth it!
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