Technology and Innovation

You can do some amazing things in your NLE. but music editing is best left to dedicated audio editing software. If you use Adobe products. Audition is your tool of choice. Sony users will probably want Sound Forge. The Avid crowd will naturally gravitate toward ProTools. Those with Macs might look at Bias Peak. If you don’t have a dedicated audio editing program, there are some free alternatives. Audacity is excellent freeware that offers all the basic editing tools and runs on Windows.

I’ve mentioned this before, but back in ancient times, we actually edited audio with razor blades and sticky tape. It took a good eye. a good ear and mountains of patience. Today, digital recording and editing make the process seem like child’s play. Back in the day. if you made a mistake, you had to start all over Today, fixing an error is just an Undo click away. You can even fix something from 30 minutes ago. so no whining about the level of difficulty.

Carving up a music piece can give it new life. You can add bits to other bits to form an entirely new creation. You can define sections to create never ending loops. Or maybe you just need a different length or feel in the piece. Music editing can do all this and much more.

Video distribution was a grim prospect ten years ago. Today there almost seem to be too many choices. As long as you know your limitations and you have the patience for some experimentation, you should be able to get pleasing results. The following question remains, though: where will video be viewed ten years from now? We really wish we could answer that, but, sadly, we left our crystal ball out in the rain

You can burn any type of file to DVD or CD for file transfer or back-up. but it most likely won’t play on a set-top player. VCDs are considered below-VHS quality and never really caught on in the States; with the low cost of blank DVD media, they most likely never will. Another consideration is bit rate. Though video bit rate on a DVD can be set as high as 9.8Mbps (without audio), pushing it above 8.5 might be asking for trouble with some players.

We’re not going to spend too much time here, as many of you already know how to encode for these technologies. (To find more specific articles, type “DVD authoring” in Vldeomakers Web search field.) Keep this in mind’, for a DVD to play in a set-top DVD player, the disc must be encoded in MPEG-2 (or DivX if your player will accept it).

Many programs can help you compress your video/audio into a 3GP or MP4 file for your cell phone, including QuickTime Pro, Sorenson’s Squeeze, Ñero Recode and Kinoma Producer. You can Google search for free programs as well, though remem-ber the general rule: you get what you pay for. Sorenson’s Squeeze may be more expensive than the rest of these options, but it gives you great control over your work and. in many ways, gives you better-looking and -sound-ing media.

With audio, music is the deciding factor. If your video is voice-only, you most likely could lower your sample rate to 22kHz, while music would be better at 32 or 44.1kHz. Lowering the bit rate can make your file smaller as well. Bit rate, or the number of bits per second of video, changes quality with different codecs. If you are using MP3 compression at 192kbps. your music will sound quite good. As far as music is concerned. 96kbps is low quality, and 320kbps is generally considered to sound exceptional. Again, this changes with the type of compression used, so you may want to experiment.

Shrinking your video resoluNext check your data rate options. With video, you will most notice the lowering of the data rate with fast movement. The more motion you have, the less you’ll want to drop the video data rate. If the program you are using has the ability to use 2-pass VBR (variable bit rate) encoding, you will benefit from the compressor’s ability to scan the media twice for better compression.

The most important setting to concern yourself with when compressing for a phone is the frame size and resolution. Many of the smart phones have a resolution of 320×320. such as most of the Treos. though some Blackberry devices have a resolution of 240×320. Many smaller videophones have a screen size of 176×144.