Video Documentation

Towards the end of the project I had to begin compiling, editing, and formatting the video documentation I had shot in order to display it at the Thesis exhibition. There were a lot of decisions to be made and I had a lot of options to consider. Once I had decided to use a television rather than projection for my display method I had to procure a television set and a DVD player.

While I was finding these and even afterward, I was working on editing the video. There were a lot of steps to this process. The camera I used was a JVC Digital HD camcorder that outputted .TOD files. These files were of high quality, but could not be read by Adobe Premiere (the video editing file I used...I also tried Final Cut Pro, but found that I liked Premiere better). So I had to download MPEG stream clip and a quick time alternative in order to change the encapsulation of the video to a format that could be read by the program. This was complicated as I had little experience in this (my thanks to Chris Weber for all the help he gave me during this step of the project). After a lot of experimenting and fiddling with the software(sometimes i produced files that started as 6 GB and ended at 70 GB), I was able to produce files of manageable size that could be read by Premiere. Next I had to edit the raw video for time and content. Some of the videos were good as they were, but in other cases a lot of video had to be edited out.

In the end I had around 56 minutes of video documenting seven performances. The video showed me shoveling the car out of a snowbank, revving the engine, doing donuts, washing the car, jacking the car up, bleeding the fluids from the car and burning the engine. Once I had the video for all of these performances edited (a painstakingly long process was involved in this) I still had to figure out how to put them on a DVD. This is where Adobe Encore came in. I simply opened the program, Chris showed me the basics and then I experimented until I got the result I wanted. I had to make five DVDs before I got one that really worked. Each time I made one though, I learned a little more about how the program worked and got closer to my ultimate goal.

At one point I thought I had done it, and I went to a friends house to view the results as at the time I had not got the DVD player yet and I needed to borrow theirs. At this point I discovered that I had forgot to de-interlace the video for one of the pieces (donuts) and the whole thing was flashing choppy lines. Because of this I had to go back, re-encapsulate the video for that piece, then re-edit the video with the new files....then render it (this takes about 3 hours) and then replace it into the DVD menu.

Finally after all this, I had a working DVD that would play immediately, then cycle through the videos in order and at the end repeat the sequence.