Editing with newbs

[DJ_Izumi]

So, like I've said elsewhere, I'm in college for a television broadcasting program and lots of editing/tech skills I learned through AMVs give me an advantage in some areas. I've been using Premiere since 2001, After Effects since 2004, and I was doing Tape-To-Tape music videos with Weird Al and the Simpsons in like 1998. I've got some experience What's so weird is, most of my classmates are fresh out of high school and thusly they all started using Adobe CS5 Master Edition, well, in September 2011.

Firstly, the school gives us a free copy of Adobe CS5 Master Edition. I mean, the whole thing, the key works on as many computers as you want and they gave us seperate Mac and PC keys. First time I've ever LIGIT owned an Adobe program other than Acrobat Reader. Fuck yeah. So, they give us serials and are told that the school library has several CS5 ME DVDs that you can check out to use as install media. At no time does the professor inform the students that they can just download Adobe software from Adobe, enter their key, and bam.

"Guys, we can just download the programs from Adobe and use the keys they gave us."
"No, I don't want to download anything, I'm not pirating it when they give it to us for free! I'll get mine from the library."
"I... I don't think you understand..."

And then there's all the interesting video things that they don't quite understand.

"I made my project, but now Premiere says everything is 'Offline'."
"Where are the files you put into them?"
"I moved them from my desktop to the trash can when I was done editing. But I saved the project, so I don't know what's wrong."

"I tried to upload a 500MB file to YouTube, and it broke my Mac's HDD, now it won't start and I lost all my files. I HATE YOUTUBE!"

"What's the difference between a composite and a component signal?"
"Composite is the crappy one, the yellow RCA one, that uses one signal and you should avoid using it for anything."
"But that's how I hooked my Xbox up to my 47" high def and it looks GREAT."

"The DSLR's files are all .MOVs, that means they won't work on your PC. You need a DSLR that makes .AVI files."

"Is this video 16:9 or 4:3? This is 16:9 right?"
"Yeah, that's 16:9"
(It was 4:3)

"That HDTV over there, is it 16:9 or 4:3?"
(I have great difficulty understanding how people can't quickly visually discern the difference between the two aspect ratios.)

We have a digital video server in our live studio, it's basically some complicated Linux based thing that can stream up to three 16:9 SD channels into our studio system. So, ya know, it's the thingy that plays clips into the mixer. It's kinda finicky about file formats, as you'd expect an embedded type media device to be. 720x480, DV Stream (Not DV AVI) or MPEG-2 only. It's also even MORE picky when it comes to color spaces, frame rates, ect. We were given a very specific preset for Adobe Premiere to export MPEG-2 4:2:2 video correctly for the server system. The thing is, while they copied each setting, no one understands what each setting means, so if they make any deviations they can't figure out what wen't wrong. The most common issue is, the prof never specified the aspect ratio setting, so most of the class have theirs set to 4:3, while trying to export 16:9 projects into a 16:9 television system. The system doesn't care about the AR flags in the stream, everything will be played to fit the 16:9 frame anyway. But Premiere DOES, so when Premiere things it's exporting 16:9 into a 4:3 export, it letter boxes it, squishing the video, and then it gets distorted when played back in the system. The result during playback is something that looks closer to 2.39:1. Also, when this happens, one of my classmates says 'It's 1080p?' He somehow thinks that that odd, stretched aspect ratio in a standard def system is '1080p'...

Additionally, sometimes people will just use ANY MPEG-2 preset in Premiere and hope it works. Any resolution other than 720x480 or 704x480 causes the box to crash and leaves students confused as to why.

"Why did you format your external HDD to ExFAT instead of FAT32 like the professor said so?"
"So I can use large files and have the drive interact with Mac or PC without issue."
"You should have done it like the professor said. ....Hey! Why can't I put this 14GB file onto my hard drive!? It says there's not enough room but there's 800GB free!"
(This one is paraphrased, I admit it)

"I hate copying files, the quality is always lower."
"No, when you copy a file on a computer, it makes an exact 1:1 copy. There's no loss unless a horrible error occurs."
"Don't tell me that crap. I don't think you know how computers work as well as you think you do."
"...Guh..."

"I downloaded this video through YouTube, then used it in my After Effects project, exported as MOV h.264, to import it into Premiere, then exported it as MPEG-2. Why does it look like crap though?"

"Yeah, but stuff we download from Google Image Search isn't copyrighted, right?"
(SOMEONE ACTUALLY ASKED THAT, WORD FOR WORD, AND HE WAS SO CONFIDENT THAT HE WAS CORRECT. D:)

Maybe I sound elitest in this, and I'm not really. I remember my own technological numbskullery with this stuff. Honest to god, I think once in IRC, in 2004, I said to Zarx "WTF IS A KEY FRAME?" as he tried to help me with AE. Maybe it was Pwolf I asked, but anyway, the superstitions that many of them see to have with their Mac Book Pros is just so odd.

[Kireblue]

fun times right?

[AMV_4000]

and this is why i still use premiere 6.5... and vhs footage... captured with the yellow cable... and export to msmpeg4v2...

[BasharOfTheAges]

It's not the fact that there's people that clueless that's disheartening, its that there are that many of them in a college level video production class. Is the person teaching the class visibly facepalming all the time? Are there actually other students that get it?

[DJ_Izumi]

It's not the fact that there's people that clueless that's disheartening, its that there are that many of them in a college level video production class.

If you think about it though, it's NOT suprising. It may be a television program but being fresh out of high school. (Not all are, though out of the three groups of first years, with 30 students in each, the group I'm in is much younger in age on average) they havn't done much with computers asside from used FaceBook and MAYBE, some high school level 'tech' or 'computer' classes. So most of them know squat about technology.

Though I must admit, what's most disillusioning is many student's utter lack of curiosity. They will try to learn what the professors present to them and that's it. They won't just fire up Google and discover the bajillion shiney things on the internet that people have made wonderful tutorials for. I've done stuff well ahead of what other classmates have done, and when they ask 'how'd you do that?' it's a combination of me watching TV and getting an idea of what something would look like, and Googling up how to make it look like that as best I can. It's not exactly rocket science. But what it is is, I don't think they appreciate just how much information is out there for this stuff. I don't think they comprehend what is out there on the net to teach you.

They also tend to assume that what their professors teach them is the be all and end all to a technique, and that the professors are infallible. They arn't, they are human, they make mistakes and they tend to only teach you to do something one way when there's probably 10 ways to do it. That FAT32 thing I think is a good example. FAT32 is the defacto standard for making a USB drive work on Mac and PC, the ExFAT thing is something fairly new. ExFAT support in Windows XP requires a hotfix, and ExFAT support in Mac OS X Snow Leopard was only introduced in Fall 2010. So it's new. That said, since any updated version of Snow Leopard or higher or Windows Vista or higher (Or XP with the hot fix) supports ExFAT, it's a great way to get around that 4GB limit on FAT32 and have full support on all systems.

Is the person teaching the class visibly facepalming all the time? Are there actually other students that get it?

No, he's suprisingly patient with the students, at least our 'Post Production/Technologies' prof is. Since obviously there's far more than one prof.

[Castor Troy]

and this is why i still use premiere 6.5... and vhs footage... captured with the yellow cable... and export to msmpeg4v2...

For me, it was all about capturing VHS footage at 15fps, using Premiere 3.0 LE, exporting a cinepak avi at 30fps, then encoding it with xing mpeg encoder to make it under 10 megs.

[DJ_Izumi]

and this is why i still use premiere 6.5... and vhs footage... captured with the yellow cable... and export to msmpeg4v2...

For me, it was all about capturing VHS footage at 15fps, using Premiere 3.0 LE, exporting a cinepak avi at 30fps, then encoding it with xing mpeg encoder to make it under 10 megs.

Before the days of cheap DVDRs, a lot of my Anime was on VCD (Generally ripped from DVD). So I'd bring my VCD MPEG-1 footage into Ulead Video Studio 3, edit it, export it as a VCD MPEG-1 and this was my master copy. :X

And Ulead Video Studio 3's MPEG encoder was AWEFUL I might add.

[Kariudo]

Freshman...
Mac Book Pro...

I see that and think that most of those kids are probably the type to give up on a problem before they even try to find a solution.

Perhaps the thing that would help these kids out the most is being locked in a concrete room (or stick them in a Faraday cage) for 8 hours and making them turn out some piece of work being given:
-Some source and a theme/story
-Internet access with youtube, facebook, twitter, etc... being blocked
-A professor with a frat paddle that has "Google it!" carved/inscribed/burned onto it

[AMV_4000]

and this is why i still use premiere 6.5... and vhs footage... captured with the yellow cable... and export to msmpeg4v2...

For me, it was all about capturing VHS footage at 15fps, using Premiere 3.0 LE, exporting a cinepak avi at 30fps, then encoding it with xing mpeg encoder to make it under 10 megs.

Before the days of cheap DVDRs, a lot of my Anime was on VCD (Generally ripped from DVD). So I'd bring my VCD MPEG-1 footage into Ulead Video Studio 3, edit it, export it as a VCD MPEG-1 and this was my master copy. :X

And Ulead Video Studio 3's MPEG encoder was AWEFUL I might add.

heh, i still have UVS 4, also, i was commenting on how I still edit...

[DJ_Izumi]

Freshman...
Mac Book Pro...

The school mandated a MBP as required hardware... Till the last moment when they decided that Final Cut Pro X was dumb and that they were going to use Premiere. So 80% of the class has MBPs while 20% are rocking PCs. I'm glad I dragged my feet on that purchase.

Perhaps the thing that would help these kids out the most is being locked in a concrete room (or stick them in a Faraday cage) for 8 hours and making them turn out some piece of work being given:
-Some source and a theme/story
-Internet access with youtube, facebook, twitter, etc... being blocked
-A professor with a frat paddle that has "Google it!" carved/inscribed/burned onto it

But YouTube itself has some pretty wonderful tutorials and examples of work. It's really about using your resources responsibily as opposed to just cutting access entirely.