DESKTOP VIDEO TIPS ================== by Andrew Ives. The following are tips I've picked up from making various home videos. I've mostly done sporting events, but this applies to virtually any home videos. I'm not a professional by any means, but I hope it is of some help. Here goes then... FILMING ======= First of all, make sure you've got a decent bit of tape inside the camera. A bit that keeps going black & white and crackles isn't much good. When you've got that, get someone competent to do the filming. (It usually ends up being me. We don't want loads of sky and ground!) Make sure you tape all the decent bits of action. Tape a bit of blank at the beginning. ie say at a school sports day, film arriving or the gate or something. (You'll need this later) After you've got all the action, film a bit of leaving as well. You'll want to lay credits over this at the end. Make sure both of these bits are a good few seconds long. EDITING ======= Watch the film through and note which bits you want to leave out. You will cut these out during the titling. Also take note of exactly what you think you should do and where to do it. ie What sort of titles do you want at the beginning? And what credits at the end? If you want "Race 1" to come up, exactly when does this happen and where on the screen should it be? Note all these down. THE HARD BIT ============ 1) Get a decent bit of tape. Don't try and cram it in after Neighbours or something, so that when you go over Neighbours your film goes with it. Try and use a tape that doesn't chew up or anything. 2) Get all your Amiga bits ready. Make sure you have all your Amiga programs to hand later. You will want:- the disk with your caption IFFs on. You'll probably want Dpaint/Scala/Caption Machine or whatever here. Make sure these programs and the data disk cover all the captions you eventually want to do. Draw any that need doing now. When you have them all, go to 3. 3) Plug all your genlock and SCART lead bits in. Play a bit of the tape to make sure all the sound and everything is connected up OK. If this is all working go to 4. 4) Turn your Amiga on and load in Dpaint/Scala/Caption Machine. Get your first few captions up and running. Do as many as you can in one go, because you will have to pause the tape later and the join may be noticeable. You want to avoid these crackly joins. You will also only have limited time before pause runs out (and the video stops) to load in your next lot of captions. 5) When everything looks organised, start recording and the camera playing. Overlay your first caption. (See caption tips later). Keep doing this until you have no more captions on your Amiga left and you have to pause the video. Quickly load in the next lot of captions and keep doing this until the end. (You may see now why I wrote Caption Machine. Five easily made captions can be done much quicker than on Dpaint and it saves you a lot of aggro looking for disks with fonts on) If you come across a boring bit you wish to cut, make the most of this pause and load in more captions to save a pause later. After doing all this, you should have a fairly OK home video. Unless you are very lucky though, you are unlikely to be entirely satisfied with it. There will be a number of things you would have liked to have done differently. Below are a number of things that should be taken into account when writing captions.... CAPTION TIPS ============ 1) Firstly and most importantly, organise everything before starting. When the place is a wiry mess and you're wondering where you left some disk, and pause is ticking away you'll realise this. 2) Use interlace where memory allows. The loss of colours though may require you to use lo-res. The results here are not too bad though and only a hi-tech genlock will show much difference. I tend to use lo-res most of the time. Use HAM and HAM8 if you can for title screens. HAM8 looks the business, and is very professional. 3) Use suitable captions/fonts/colours. You don't want the captions to be too intrusive. The film is about the subject of the film, not a showcase for your captions. You don't want the style to swamp the content. Use captions sparingly and tastefully. 4) Watch a lot of telly where graphics are used. The best places are Channel 4 (especially Italian football, trailers), MTV, Eurosport and foreign channels. Foreign channels often do things unconventionally and you might be "inspired" by this. 5) Look around for slightly obscure Amiga programs. Everyone uses Deluxe Paint, but often scrolls and things can be done on other programs quicker and easier. Caption Machine (and also Dot Matrix Scroller) don't do anything Dpaint can't, but they do it easier and quicker. Strange, big, bold fonts are handy too. Be on the lookout for related material to your video. If you are doing school sports videos for instance, digitise/ film the programmes/school mag and make it look like the captions go with the video. 6) Make sure your captions have contrast. You don't want your captions completely blending into the background. No white words on a white sky. Station idents are a good way to notice this. Decide where and which colour to use on your captions before you even start recording. If you do one invisible caption in the middle of a film, you'll have trouble getting rid of it. 7) Don't put captions over the action (obviously) but also don't put them above/below the action so that it distracts the viewer and the viewer doesn't properly see either. If they have to keep rewinding the tape, their interest will soon wane. 8) Make things big, BOLD and bright. You want your captions to be readable from a distance. You don't want to make people squint reading your one-pixel-wide writing. Use shadows and outline to give some contrast. 9) Keep a similar style throughout. You don't want the writing to keep changing from spacey to old-English and back again. This looks very amateur. Try and use a kerning font for general purpose work. This looks as though it wasn't typed and is more professional. A lot of programmes use these. 10) Remember, that you will be familiar with your captions (you made them) and that the viewer will take longer to read them than you will. Make sure it remains on screen long enough to read it all. Captions that disappear before you read them are so aggravating. Err on the side of too long rather than too short. Also bear in mind, that your video may take a while to "kick in" after pressing record. By the time the video is recording properly, you shouldn't be removing the caption. There are plenty more things than this to remember, but these are the main faults you will see. Follow all these guidelines and you can't go too far wrong. I hope these make your videos better for you and the viewer.