My formula for creating videocasts

Here it is.

  • Import DV video with WinDV.
  • Edit with Windows Movie Maker. Because its features are very basic, I don’t get sidetracked with learning fancy tricks.
  • Save final edit as DV-AVI file. Use WinDV to save it back to a Mini-DV tape.
  • Encode to MP4 with PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter. I like that you can choose a target file size, and it’s fast.

Rich Pav

Richard has been living in Japan since 1990 with his wife and two teenage sons, Tony and Andy.

5 thoughts to “My formula for creating videocasts”

  1. Some ideas on your PC slowdown/jerkiness:

    1.2 ghz is a bit slow for video editing… I think more than 1 shared IRQ is definitly compounding your problem. Sometimes one PCI slot will share IRQs, try and find out which PCI slot shares IRQs and pull out whatever device is in that slot (and don’t use that slot if possible) Your graphics card is not a problem, but you could have a buggy driver release. Make sure your ATI Radeon drivers are the most recent driver downloads. While most Macs can handle video editing at 1.2 ghz, they OS is much more efficient at using RAM than any Windows machine could ever be.

    So if you dont’ want to spend anymore money, try these things:
    – find out which PCI slot on your mother board shares IRQs, and don’t use it if possible.
    – run Regclean… do a google search for Regclean 4.1, its from MS… it will fix any registry errors.
    – run Defrag on all of your drives.
    – visit ATI’s website and download the driver updates for Radeon video cards.

    If these things don’t get rid of your problem, then maybe consider another machine.

    Let me know if any of this helps.

    1. Bryan, thanks a lot! That’s exactly the kind of information I was hoping to get.

      I have three PCI slots–one is the graphics card, the other a SATA board, and the other a combo USB2/Firewire/Ethernet card. When I remove the combo card, graphics speed up quite a bit. I need a mobo with more features onboard and support for a faster CPU.

  2. I think that is a good strategy for creating Video Casts. At the beginning i was in the frame of mind of a full blown editing suite, but I can see that for 3 minute or less vidcasts this is perfect.

    I am glad that you are back doing podcasts. You shouldn;t feel that your podcasts are not good. You know…I think that your soundseeing tours around Japan are the best out of all the Japan podcasts.

    When I saw the Akihabara vidcasts and others you reminded of Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”. I thought “Hey thats Bill!” 😀

    In regards to your problem, I think that one of those things that Bryan said will solve your problem. I know that I have come across that and we had to change the Graphics card. But i don;t think that this is the case in this situation.

  3. At Crash Test Kitchen we download/edit with Adobe Premiere Elements, save a full-sized AVI and then crunch it down to MPEG4/H.264 with QuickTime Pro. Adobe Premiere Elements is great to use, although I believe it doesn’t work with the new hard drive based camcorders. I don’t really believe in these camcorders because they compress the video and I’d rather work with raw AVI.

    You should sign up to the videoblogging group at Yahoo Groups if you’re not already a member.

    Waz.

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