F _ I _ N _ I _ S _ H _ I _ N _ G

T _ H _ E___ _ M _ O _V_ I _ E

When you're satisfied with your digital story, preview the entire movie, save your project file, and get ready to make some decisions about the size and quality of your finished movie.

In its raw form, digital video takes up a lot of memory. For example, one second of video appropriate for playback on VCRs takes about 27 Mb of disk space. For that reason, most digital video is compressed in some way. Compression not only saves memory, but it often improves how well the movie will play in the many ways it can be shown to an audience. How will people be viewing your finished movie: on videotape, from CD-ROM, from your hard drive, or on the Web? For each way your movie could be seen, there will be an optimal method to compress it.

Videotape ___

Because you're not transmitting a computer file to your audience, you don't have to worry so much about the hard disk space or speed of their computers. Output to video for the home moviemaker means that the movie must play well on your hard drive with good image quality, sound, and motion. There should be no dropped frames or breaks in audio. If you encounter these problems in playback, your movie is challenging your computer and winning. Experiment with the settings. The right compression may help you make the movie of a size that your computer will handle well.

CD-ROM_ __

The concern here is the speed of the CD-ROM drive. The earliest drives were 2x speed. Current drives run up to 24x. You must think about the likely age of your viewer's drives and adjust the compression to match.

Web_ __

Delivery via the Web calls for attention to not only the speed of the viewer's computer, but the type of connection they have to the Web. For viewers to receive the file in a reasonable time, a slow connection (14.4 or 28.8 bps) calls for a highly compressed movie. Faster connections can handle larger file sizes, but transmitting a completely uncompressed movie is still out of the question.

C _ o_ m _ p _ r _ e_ s _ s _i _ o _ n_

For those of you who investigated digitizing video earlier in the moviemaking process, compression will already be a somewhat familiar topic. For those who gave that step a pass, there's no avoiding the subject anymore. You've got your own piece of digitized video now!

Choosing the best compression method to match your needs is tricky. Understanding some of the underlying concepts, combined with lots of experimentation, is the only way to get a good feel for it. For understanding the underlying concepts, we can recommend no better teachers than the people at Terran Interactive. As we mentioned on the digitizing video page, they've provided a wealth of good, clear information for the beginning digital moviemaker on what compression is all about.

If you work on a Macintosh, consider using Terran's program Media Cleaner Pro 3.1 to build and compress your movie. They provide a plug-in module for Premiere that allows you to take your finished Premiere project file and export it directly into Media Cleaner Pro. From there, it provides a settings wizard, a friendly “expert system” based on the knowledge of dozens of compression professionals. It discusses your movie and desired results with you, and then creates compression settings based on your needs. As a beginner you don't need to know the technical details of issues like data rates, keyframe, frequency, and codec choice using the wizard. The program will show you and help you understand the visual consequences of various tradeoffs, such as how movies look at different frame rates.

If you don't work on the Macintosh operating system, we will walk you through the process in Premiere, but for the background on how to make the best decisions for you, we will link to Terran's site.

M _ a_ k _ e ___ m _o _ v _ i _e_S

Pull down the Make menu and choose Make Movie. The following dialog box appears:

Give your movie a file name and append the .mov extension to it, which is important to ensure that your movie is recognized by all other computers as a QuickTime movie. The Make, Video, Compression, and Audio settings that are selected by default are shown here. To change them, you will hit the Output Options and Compression buttons for more choices.

O _ u_ t _ p _ u _ t_ ___ _ o _p _ t _ i _o_n_sS

Clicking on this button brings up the following dialog box:

Set up your dialog box to match this window. We are leaving the video and audio selections the same as what we used for the preview options when constructing the movie. This will make building the movie faster, as Premiere doesn't have to reprocess the data. Of the check boxes in the bottom of the window, Flatten is quite important. Without taking this step, movies made on the Macintosh will not run on computers using the Windows operating system. Choose OK, and you're returned to the Make Movie menu.

C _ o_ m _ p _ r _ e_ s _ s__i _ o__nS

Click on the Compression button to reach this menu:

It is through these settings that the final quality and size of your movie will be determined.

C _ o_ m _ p _ r _ e_ s _ s__o _ r__S

Pull down the top box and a variety of compressor options will be available to you. These are the options available to a Macintosh using QuickTime Pro 3.0 and no special video cards:

Your list may vary. To read about the various compressors (also known as codecs), visit Terran Interactive's Codec central for detailed information on the strengths and limitations of each of your options.

Q _ u_ a _ l _ i _ t_ y _ S

If you have copied a clip from your Construction Window before reaching this dialog box, that clip will appear in the box in the right hand corner. As you've seen many times before in this tutorial, better quality always requires more memory. However, you can often see substantial decreases in file size with only a little degradation in image quality by using the Medium or High settings. Experiment to see what's best for you.

M _ o_ t _ i _ o _ n

_ _ S

These settings will determine how smoothly your movie moves and whether there are likely to be dropped frames. Frames per second determines just that, how many frames appear each second. For movies that do not contain very many complex transitions, image pans, or motion settings, 15 fps is often fine, especially for movies seen over the Web or on CD-ROM. Movies to be output to videotape show better at 29.97 or 30 fps. (The broadcast standard is 29.97 fps.) Once again, higher frame rates mean bigger final movies.

Key frames are those frames that QuickTime uses as reference frames. It makes sure that those frames are compressed with all their information intact. The frames in between them are compressed, and the only information that's kept are the changes between key frames. By default, if no value is set for key frames, it will sample a key frame every second. With 15 fps, that would be a key frame every 15 frames. That setting might be fine for most movies, but if you have a lot of quick cuts, and you are making a very compressed movie, some of your images might be dropped from the finished movie. You would change the key frame setting to a value smaller than your fps value. As you might imagine, more frequent key frames makes for a larger finished file size.

Data rate is somewhat of an advanced concept, but you can read about it [link] on the Terran Interactive site if you wish. Briefly, it is another way to have control over the size and quality of your finished movie.

G _ r_ i _ n _ d _ i_ n _ g ___ o _ u _ t _ __ t _h _ e _ __

f _i _ n _ a _l_ __ m _o _ v _ i _e_ S

Once you have adjusted the settings to your liking, hit OK in the Make Movie dialog box. A Making Movie progress bar will come up, showing you how far the movie has progressed and how much time Premiere estimates it will take to complete. Depending on the size of your movie, the type of compression you have chosen, and the speed of your computer, the processing time could take from a few minutes to a few hours. Media Cleaner Pro is considerate; it will estimate beforehand how much time the building process will take. With Premiere, it is a surprise that waits until you actually start to build the movie.

If you checked the box "Open finished movie" in your Output Options, a movie window will pop up at the end of processing.

This is identical to the clip window for our piece of digitized video. Here you can play your movie and edit it a bit. For instance, you can change your in and out points to eliminate any unintended white screens at the end of your movie.

 

Here's how the movie looks in your folder:

It's a Premiere movie file, and when you try to open it some other time, it will launch Premiere.

 

To make it look like a generic QuickTime movie, open the movie in the QuickTime Movie Player and Save As a self-contained movie.

 
Now the movie will bear the QuickTime icon, and you will be able to share it with anyone who has QuickTime on their machine, be it Windows or Macintosh.