Editing with newbs

[Castor Troy]

Your school must be rich if they can get all of their film students a Macbook Pro.

Or are the Macbook Pros part of the tuition fees?

[DJ_Izumi]

Your school must be rich if they can get all of their film students a Macbook Pro.

Or are the Macbook Pros part of the tuition fees?

Nither. The school simply said 'Hey, this is a Mobile Learning program starting this year. We're going to use FCP so you have to get a Mac, we suggest you get the Mac Book Pro. Everyone who got a mac, got an MBP but one student has an older Mac Book.

Those who waited till Sept to get a machine were greated on the first day that the program would infact be using Premiere and the rest of CS5, and the school would be giving out CS5 keys for Mac and PC. So some students, myself included, didn't have to find the $1850 to get Mac Book Pro. I use an Acer myself.

So yaeh, it was an 'extra cost' much like a textbook would be. And most were told they really, really should et the $1850 laptop, only to find out afterwards that almost any laptop woulda done the job.

[Nya-chan Production]

I can't even say how much I am facepalming right now...

[DJ_Izumi]

I can't even say how much I am facepalming right now...

The classmate who thinks that YouTube broke his HDD, is still fairly unwilling to accept my explaination of 'Assuming you didn't drop your laptop, the HDD probably just died randomly' on the basis that it had a new HDD. He's just unable to believe that new things can break while new. It's so odd.

[Ikore]

"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?"

this one, made me remember those old days I spent trying to learn how to compress ...

[DJ_Izumi]

"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?"

this one, made me remember those old days I spent trying to learn how to compress ...

These days I try not to feel dirty just for using a 4:2:0 color space. I accept that I must use 4:2:0, though in some circumstances, 4:2:2, because I don't have access to video camera equiptment that shoots in RAW.

[hasteroth]

heh, I'm in Film Studies at Ryerson University (it's not all theory like the University of Toronto program, it's almost entirely hands on).

And well I've met far too many people that have never touched editing software before in their lives, so yeah I can sympathize.

[hasteroth]

(sorry about the double post)

The fun thing about my program is they let the editors use whatever they want and edit on whatever they want. Because all you hand in is the final video, the program is taught with FCP but I myself use Premiere Pro CS5.5 (got CS6 for next year though). In fact if we want the Tools and Apps (editing, effects, etc) prof will teach Avid outside of class.

[TEKnician]

There REALLY needs to be a class dedicated to learning digital video theories.

Someone asked me why their videos look horrible. I said to them:

"The video has to know where where each pixel and color has to go. Your computer threw out some of that info just to make the file size smaller. When you converted that YouTube video you found and downloaded it, the method you used threw out some data that said that pixels should be there."

"So how do I get a higher quality video from YouTube?"

"Just don't. It will never work."

Now this was a 60 year old lady. You think I'm gonna tell her how to actually get an HD video off of YouTube and onto her iPad?

[DJ_Izumi]

There REALLY needs to be a class dedicated to learning digital video theories.

Someone asked me why their videos look horrible. I said to them:

"The video has to know where where each pixel and color has to go. Your computer threw out some of that info just to make the file size smaller. When you converted that YouTube video you found and downloaded it, the method you used threw out some data that said that pixels should be there."

"So how do I get a higher quality video from YouTube?"

"Just don't. It will never work."

Now this was a 60 year old lady. You think I'm gonna tell her how to actually get an HD video off of YouTube and onto her iPad?

The problem though is this: It's a LOT of freakin' info. Let's be honest here, how many of us took a fairly long time from 'square one' to 'totally knowing what we're doing'? Early on, how many things were you doing just because you were TOLD to do them in a tutorial, without knowing what it actually meant?

Sure, I can spew off 29.97 or 23.976 off the top of my head without thinking now, but few of my classmates could... But I'm the one who's seen those numbers a million times in the last twelve years.

I could never gain the knowledge I have in 2-3 years at school, with four months off in the summer. There's just too damn much. Heck, I'm still learning things. I only l earned that there was a world beyond 8 bit per channel RGBA this summer. Red cinema cameras, with wavelet compressed REDCODE RAW video, with 12 bits per channel? I havn't gotten to work with that kinda material beyond samples I've downloaded, but it blows away what you can do with YUV 4:2:0 8bpc crap we've been pulling off DVDs and Blu-Rays for AMVS. Even for photos, I can only use RAW 14bpc files as opposed to JPEGs after realizing how awesome raw data off the sensor is.