Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Making Videos: What Happens After Filming?

May 11, 2009 | Feature, Webmaster Crap

I did a post about how to maximize your video quality. I also did a video showing the exact equipment I use to make videos. But, what happens after that? What happens once I get the footage over to my computer?

A reader, Chris Langston, submitted the following:

What I would like to know is after you have captured your video’s, how are you going about editing and then rendering the final product?  I’m capturing with a Sanyo HD camera, then pop-the SD card into my computer, editing with Sony Vegas Movie Studio, rendering an .avi file and then re-rendering to *.flv format.  This all takes a lot of time after the video has been shot.  I was looking to streamline my process and wanted to see what you recommend and how you are doing things.

What happens after filming is very important. Once you get that footage over to the computer, then what?

Personally, I use a Mac. My process is this:

  1. Import video directly into iMovie 09.
  2. Drag footage into a new iMovie project and do a rough arrangement of the scenes.
  3. Drag and drop the video intro to the beginning of the movie.
  4. Put transitions in between the different scenes.
  5. Put a title slate onto the beginning, right after the intro reel.
  6. Export.

When putting the video onto public video sites, I’ll usually export using iMovie’s built-in settings which output an M4V file. I then upload the M4V directly via TubeMogul and all of the different video sites take care of converting to FLV automatically. For Youtube and Vimeo, I like to have HD quality so sometimes I will upload to those sites separately using a movie of 1280×720 dimensions.

When I host the video myself, I have to do my own FLV encoding. What I usually do is export to MOV. Then I use the FLV Encoder that comes with Adobe CS3 suite to re-encode the movie into FLV format. Imovie does have an option to export directly to FLV format as well, but I believe you need to have the Adobe Suite installed to have that option.

There’s really no super-fast way to do this, however. Imovie makes for some slick and fast video editing as long as you’re happy with the templates it provides. However, the process of exporting is pretty much the same regardless of which software you use.

What software do YOU use? Got any shortcuts you’d like to share? Please comment.

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  • I use iMovie 09 on a mac, then upload the videos as a Mv4 like David said.

    I am not a Partner on YouTube yet so I have had to work hard at figuring out how to get good thumbnails for my clips. It used to be easier, but as of Dec. '08, they threw a monkey-wrench into the way we normal people can figure out the Thumbnail thing.

    After many long nights, I have cracked the YouTube Thumbnail code. On my YouTube thumbnail research page I tell you how to anticipate with 100% accuracy where thumbnails are pulled from your videos on YouTube for a 30 second (exactly 30:00 not one frame over or under!) video.

    I can show you how to properly snag all 3 thumbnails!

    Check it out--FREE YouTube Thumbnail Calculations--for 30 second videos on YouTube:
    http://www.videoleadsonline.com/youtube-thumbna...
  • Thanks David,
    Im a mac evangelist too and i like how it keeps it simple.
    "brainless and painless" is how easy it is to make a decent movie in imovie. quicktime pro for $4o is a must have accessory for versatile imovie finish encoding.
    after that I do usually convert it to .flv file (on QTpro) so I can upload it into my ezs3 video players and have my original video hosted on amazon s3.
    I just got an email from ezs3 about how I can speed up my online videos by "signing up for amazon cloudfront" or something like that, i have to look into further.
    you-tube and tube mogul come next for me too , but i DO like the rss and podcast features in traffic geyser.
    ya, we discussed your different opinions about that when we met in San Diego at MC2.

    in fact tonight im making and rendering videos using imovie and a mac screencapture software program that works kinda like the pc camtasia but only cost me about 40$ called iShowU by shinywhitebox.
    The compressing and re-encoding into different movie file formats is definitely the slowest process and i usually save this part for the end of my night and just go to bed while the software finishes encoding.
    thanks and take care
    Bryan Bliss
  • Well i use the Windows Movie Maker to make simple slides and videos. To change the formats I use a free converter called "Any Video Converter". Its quite good.

    Well I would love to invest in better softwares in the future but my work doesn't require to do videos that much. I usually outsource this part of the work to my videographer friends. :)
  • Thanks for providing the details. The more and more I see how quick and painless the mac makes things, the more it makes me consider switching platforms (and the commercials are too funny as well).

    I wasn't aware of the m4v format until this post. I'll see if Sony Vegas Movie Studio supports the m4v process and maybe that will be one more time saving tip I can start utilizing.
  • I usually just take the video off my digital camera and move it to my mac. I will then add titles and sound to it. After the titles and sound I will then export the video and post it to You Tube or TubeMogul.
  • I use several different program to do all my post film editing. Being a PC user I use the regular old Windows Movie Maker to do my capturing. I them do any clip editing with Sony Vegas Movie Studio and sound editing with CoolEdit pro. I then use Vegas to render to an .avi file, .mov, or directly to .mpeg file formats. One hint is you need to make sure you have the audio setting correct for .mpeg2 or you will get no sound, don't use the default setting or you have to render video then sound at different times. If I need to make any changes in format I use mediacoder. This is a great opensource program that I found, it is fast light and does a great job. A little learning curve but they have a host of articles for help, it is available here http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/ Like Dave said, youtube and tubemogul both convert to .flv automatically so you don't need to spend the time unless you embed only to your blog.(Not recommended) That's about it, have some more tricks but they are not so great! Best of luck!
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