Podcasting and video on-line

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I am utterly clueless about this process and what it entails, and I'm months behind schedule for what I'm trying to do with it. So this is sort of a code red, and I'm looking for very clear, instructional answers.

1. What home equipment do I need for recording?

2. What software & hardware do I need for editing and adding commentary?

2. What software do I need for storing? Is any of it freely available? (I understand there's something called Skype; does this count?)

3. What programming do I need for presenting? Ditto.

I really, really don't want to enter into a "heard about this," or "you can do this or that," without specifics. Pure information, links, offers of direct non-vague services, are all welcome.

Payment for the latter is available. Pretty serious business, actually.

Best,
Ron

[Andrew Morris]

Ron, there was this thread a while back. In that thread, there was this link to a c|net article on podcasting. It's very thourogh. My knowledge is all theoretical, though, since I've never done this myself, so other than the link, I'll step aside and let others with more practical experience step up. Just thought I'd post it in case you hadn't seen it.

[TonyLB]

There are several categories of equipment and software.  I will try, in this post, to give you the terminology to discuss things more precisely.

Video:  Video is taken by a video camera and stored in (roughly) one of three media:

• There is classic, analog tape, which maintains a signal which can be put directly out to a television screen or a VCR, but which can not be directly fed into an unaugmented computer.
• There are various digital tape formats (Digital 8, etc).  To the best of my knowledge, the actual digital information being stored on those tapes is all to the same standard (DV, for simply "digital-video" standard):  it is almost entirely uncompressed data, and takes a lot of digital space.  The different formats are just different physical form factors for the tapes ... more the difference between a 5.25" floppy disk and a 3.5" floppy disk than the difference between a CD and vinyl.  Digital cameras will almost always have output through the FireWire standard:  a high-data cable which can dump the huge amounts of digital data to a computer in real-time.
• There are disk recorders, which take burnable DVDs.  They do not record to an uncompressed format ... instead they compress the incoming data into MPEG encoding (see below) as best they can in real-time.  These produce video that works well enough on a TV screen, but which may have been too thoroughly (or haphazardly) compressed to be much use to you as raw footage.

So there are your camera choices.  I would recommend almost any of the digital tape cameras, as they all do a pretty stellar job of what they're designed to do, and what they're designed to do is to get video from the real world into your computer.  If you already have a disk camera then when you get your software setup you can try some shots and see if they meet your quality needs:  if they do you're good to go.  If you already have a good analog camera then you'll have to decide between buying a digital or buying a tool that converts analog input into FireWire output.  For that last task I have been a long-term used of the Canopus ADVC-100 ... but they seem to have supplanted that with the ADVC-110.  I'm all envious.  If you get it (which you probably won't) you'll get features I don't have.  Anyway, it's a solid bridge from analog to digital if you need one.

Computer hardware:  If you don't have a Firewire input, get one.  The cards are dirt cheap.  There's really no better way to get video into a computer ... doing anything else is like trying to jury-rig a microphone hookup through your keyboard port.  Firewire is how video hits the computer.

Okay, yes, there are video cards out there which have television in ports, and which (while they're not telling your monitor what pixels to show) will real-time compress your video into MPEG, with all the problems (only much worse) of the disk-based video cameras.  If you want to explore those alternatives you can do so.  If you're already heavily invested into an analog camera then that may be your cheapest way to get video.  But I'll stand by my claim that getting video into your system by way of FireWire and the DV standard is going to get you better results.

Editing Software:  So now you have a bunch of DV files (digital video ... remember?) and buried inside of them are all the pieces you want to pull out and string together.  You need a program that can look at video, chop it up, tape it together, organize it, catalog it and just generally work with it the way that a word processor can work with raw text.  You're talking about a video editing program.  You've got options, but it basically comes down to this:  expensive programs (like Adobe Premiere) are expensive because they make doing this really, really easy (and, yeah, they do some things the cheaper ones can't, but you have to be fairly expert before you notice that).  Cheap programs (like Ulead Video Studio) are cheap because they provide pretty much the same basic power but they haven't been as painstakingly designed, and so you will batter your head against the brick wall of the program for some randomly determined time before you figure out how to make it do what you want.  If you're going to do this just two or three times, don't waste a lot of money.  If you're going to make a hobby (or, more, a business) of doing this video editing then you need to figure out what gives you the best return on your money.

Same thing goes for audio editing software (which you're probably going to need for overlaying commentary on your video).  Cheap programs let you do the job.  Expensive programs make it feel like they're doing the job for you.

Compression Standards:  When you've cut and spliced your video together, you may still have it in DV format.  As the multi-gigabyte file sizes will tell you, that is not the format in which you want to distribute to the world-wide-web.  Instead you want to "compress" the files by having software go through and rewrite it in a Various places have their own compression schemes:  for instance, DVDs are compressed according to a scheme called MPEG-2.  iTunes video is compressed according to a scheme called H.264 QuickTime.  Like that.  Your video editing software will probably have options to compress to the format you want to deliver to.  But, in planning, you should bear in mind that compression can take a long, long time.  Like, overnight or longer.  Your computer just sits there and thinks and thinks.  Faster computers think faster, but none of them compress video at a speed that's likely to make you happy.

Once the video is compressed to a format, any computer that understands how to uncompress that format will be able to show the video.

So, now, to answer your original questions

1. What home equipment do I need for recording?

A video camera, a decent microphone, and some way (either in the camera or separate) to get your video from the camera into your computer.

2. What software & hardware do I need for editing and adding commentary?

Video and audio editing software, and a microphone.

2. What software do I need for storing? Is any of it freely available? (I understand there's something called Skype; does this count?)

It will sit on your hard drive.  You may need a bigger hard drive.

3. What programming do I need for presenting? Ditto.

Once compressed, you can upload the video to any web server, just the way you normally would.  EXCEPTION:  the RealVideo standard requires a web-based server running special software which negotiates with the client at the far end what version of the data (of several differently compressed versions) to send at any particular moment.  RealVideo's cool, but also a pain, and almost certainly beyond what you want.

One thing:  Video files are large.  If you put a two megabyte video file (quite small, in the world of video) up on your web-site, and then you (oh, say) post a link to it here on the Forge you can expect ... what ... a couple thousand people to view it, very quickly?  Thats several gigabytes of bandwidth that you've just served.  You might want to check with your web-hosting company about whether they have bandwidth limits, and how much they will charge you when (not if) you exceed them.

Wow ... my fingers hurt.  I hope this helps!

[Nathan P.]

IIRC you're a faculty member at a University. This is good because it means that you're eligable for many educational discounts on expensive software packages. Academic Superstore has good, good rates. As you can see from their featured Digital Video Products, you can pick up some good software for way below retail. If you haven't done this kind of thing before, you need to check each individual product for eligability - there's a column on the left-hand side with a chart. If it says "yes" in the Faculty/Higher Ed box, you're good to go. Also check for platform dependency.

As far as I know, if you can afford it it is pretty much always better (in terms of easier, less of a headache and less time-consuming, as well as in terms of finished product) to purchase a fuller-featured program than to try to work with free or shareware programs. Also, when you buy it, you get access to support docs and technical hotlines that you wouldn't have if you acquired it in some other fashion.

I haven't done any video editing, so I can't be much help in picking out products.

As for presenting video, the easiest thing in my mind is to output it as a .mpg or .mov file, and then you upload it to your webspace just like a PDF. It's up to your audience to have the software to play the file once it's downloaded. As Tony says, bandwidth is a big consideration for video, as it tends to get fairly large for anything of significant length.

Hope some of that helps.

[Alex F]

Not what you asked, but books: O'Reilly are pretty thorough on all things computer (I should declare that I've contributed to one of their books, though not a techie one) but are pretty good at getting you over initial learning bumps: the main guide, which I've perused and looks very good, and the pocket guide.

[Clay]

Ron,

I don't know if you have a telecom department there at the university, but if you do they may be able to help you out.  They have the advantage of already having all of the equipment and software, as well as knowing what they're doing. 

On the more practical side, Linux Journal has run several multimedia articles in the last few months, including hardware recommendations.  I don't think that the video situation on Linux would be acceptable for you, but Audacity is a very easy to use audio recording and processing program which I have used, and works exceptionally well on Windows and Macintosh. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

For just audio recording, set up Audacity on a laptop and record through the built in microphone.  According to the audio pros I spoke with, this microphone definitely gives the most bang for the buck for simple spoken word.  The demo that I participated in used an inexpensive amp, and even cheaper microphone that was resistant to dropping ($10 second hand). The sound quality was quite good, especially considering that he was recording in a noisy, echoing coffee shop.  His recommendation for somebody wanting an external microphone was one of the fairly inexpensive microphones designed specifically for computers.

[talysman]

I haven't done video podcasting, although I know about audio podcasting and also video editing (I put together some demo videos for an art grant two different years for our local experimental music festival.)

Podcasting is just recording sound or video and then creating an RSS wrapper. So, you have two files: the wrapper and the actual content. You upload them to webspace, edit your webpage to link to the RSS file, and you're all set.

The recording and editing part is a bit tricky, because the point of podcasting is to create media content you can transfer to an iPod or other on-the-go device. Thus, contrary to what Tony said, you can't use RealMedia; that's for streaming video. Even though you can create a downloadable RealMedia file, it won't work on a video iPod, so there's no point. (Real and Apple are at war, so that's not likely to change without hacking.

So, for video, you want mpeg-4 video. I haven't checked the specs to see if iPod supports mpeg-2 or mpeg-1; it's certainly possible, but since I used to work for Apple tech support, I can tell you that Apple pushes mpeg-4. It's a more up-to-date video standard and it will get video files down to small size without as much loss of quality.

Note that if you want to release video as podcast first, but have the option to create and sell DVDs later on, you need to either create a second video in mpeg-2 format and the proper dimensions, or keep your high-quality raw video so you can create it later. The difference is that if you create your DVD directly with the full-quality video, your DVD authoring program will create the mpeg-2 in the proper format for you; if, however, you make the mpeg-2 first and use that as your video source, the DVD authoring software has to transcode it from mpeg-2 to mpeg-2 (don't ask) and you lose a little bit of quality. If you don't do either of these things and try instead to use your mpeg-4 podcast video as your video source for DVD authoring, you will lose a LOT of quality. Don't do this.

The software I would recommend for audio podcasting (creating the RSS file) would be Podifier. It's free, is included with some commercial products anyways, is easy to use and does everything for you on the XML end. I have not investigated video podcasting personally, so I can't recommend any specific application, although since I understand XML, I would just change the video file's name temporarily to .mp3, create the RSS file in Podifier, then change the name back and edit the RSS by hand.

If you are on a Mac, Apple has instructions for creating video podcasts in Quicktime. They also have instructions for Quicktime for Windows.

Now, for the video capture and editing part. Tony mentioned the difference between analog video and DV video. He recommended using firewire for DV. I'd also recommend using firewire for analog; just get a "DV bridge" device, like the one Pinacle makes (that's what I use for capturing video from my Hi-8 camcorder.) For editing, unless you have some really special needs, use Windows Movie Maker (which comes with WinXP) or iMovie on the Mac; they will do more than you really need for what this project sounds like. If you *do* have special needs and want to do some really elaborate video effects, my advice is: NO. You do not have those special needs, you just think you do. All you really need are titles, a way to string clips together, simple dissolve transitions, and a way to add a second audio stream for your commentary. Windows Movie Maker and iMovie will do all this and more.

Speaking of commentary, you will want to record this separately as an MP3. edit it,  then add it to your video. You need Audacity, which is free, available for both Windows and Mac, and a pretty damned good multitrack audio editor. It's limitation is that, if you only have 512MB of RAM, you aren't going to be able to edit an hour of commentary all at once without some problems. Trust me on this, I've tried it.

One last thing about video editing: Windows Movie Maker insists on trying to save most things as Microsoft's lame WMV format. The one exception is the DV-AVI format, which is the option you want to chose, even though that can't be your final product. What you want to do is save your DV format video first, back it up, then use VirtualDub to convert it to an MPEG-4 format for use in podcasting. Either that, or get the commercial version of Quicktime for Windows and follow Apple's directions I linked to earlier.

Let me know if you need anything else.

[talysman]

OK, I forgot that, although VirtualDub will do all kinds of conersions, it can't interpret audio in a DV file, so that particular step I described won't work. I'm sure you can do the conversion with another free tool, AVISynth, but that is one of those edit-a-text-file scripting language tools and probably not what you want to even get into.

So, if you aren't doing the Quicktime Pro route, you will need something like [ur=http://www.dvd-tool.com/ipod-video-converter.html]iPod video converter[/url] to convert WMV to iPod format. That actually makes it easier. If you get Quicktime Pro instead, I'm not sure how you would do the titles, since I've never used the editing features of Quicktime; I use the video editor that came with my DVD writer or Windows Media Player.

[talysman]

bah. clickable link.

[rafial]

For those on Macintosh, the new version of GarageBand that comes in iLife06 appears to be all about "podcasting for the rest of us": http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/   While not the most sophisticated, iLife 06 + a .Mac account (for publishing) would be a fast track to the world of podcasting for not too much money (assuming you already had the Mac :)

[Andrew Morris]

I haven't checked the specs to see if iPod supports mpeg-2 or mpeg-1; it's certainly possible,

No. The video iPod only plays mp4 files.

Videora offers a free iPod converter that will turn pretty much any video file into an mp4 file, if that's the route you choose to go. I've used it several times to convert movies for my iPod. It's slow and takes a bit of learning, but it's free.

[talysman]

Right, I just checked Apple's site, and they say that the iTunes Music store only supports .mp4, .m4v, and .mov (presumably using mpeg-4 codec only) for video podcasting enclosures.

Which makes sense, because for mpeg-1, for example, the only format that's going to work on the iPod's 320x240 screen is VCD format. One hour of VCD format mpeg-1 video is about 600 MB; that's bigger than any iPod. The only way you're going to be able to get reasonable-sized video for iPod is with mpeg-4.

[talysman]

Hmm, what a coincidence... Wired/Webmonkey has an audio podcast this week about video podcasts and video blogging that points to this website with some tutorials for iMove and Movie Maker.

[Jason Morningstar]

Hey Ron,

Your IT/instructional technology/media library group on campus may offer consulting services, and they may have equipment you can check out and try.  On my campus you can get training and check out high-end digital video cameras, lighting kits, and sound gear.

I wasn't clear from the wording of your message if strictly audio content is of interest to you - if it is, I put up a best practices document based on what I learned at PodcasterCon, where a room of about 100 people actively creating audio content hashed out some agreement on what worked and what gear was best.  With links to stuff.  I'm doing this myself and learning as I go.

--Jason