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| Notice: | Even here I have to mention that the music is and will be the courtesy of CHAPTER X ! I just have the permission to produce and publish a music video for the first track of their last CD. The permission goes upto the fact that music video broadcasting stations are allowed to show the video on their channels. However, it's prohibited to sell this video on CD/DVD/whatever. This limit applies similar to the song at the main CHAPTER-X webpage ! |
And now for something completely different, the video. The song to the video is "First Dance" and it's the first song on the CD "More than Ten Years Of...". I present the video in 3 formats: AVI (DIVX), MPEG1 (VCD) and MPEG2 (SVCD). There are 2 AVI versions, one smaller and one bigger version. The video-time is about 258 seconds, which means 4 minutes and 18 seconds.
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The small AVI version (DIVX4/MP3, 384x288, video: 600 KBit/s, audio: 128 KBit/s, 23365102 Bytes) | |
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The VCD/MPEG version (MPEG1/MPEG2, 352x288 sized 4:3, leads to
384x288, video: 1150 KBit/s, audio: 224 KBit/s, 44878764 Bytes),
for those who needs it, MPEG1 compared to DIVX is quite inferior
and will die in some years. But: you can play it on a DVD player
instead of DIVX. Some day this will also work for DIVX files
but as long as this does not happen I also publish a DVD compatible
MPEG version.
Audio and video are now synchronized like in the AVI-files. |
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The big AVI version (DIVX4/MP3, 688x512, video: 1000 KBit/s, audio: 128 KBit/s, 36680426 Bytes), just to show what's possible with today's technology. DVD-quality is also possible, read more about it here. | |
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The SVCD/MPEG2 version (MPEG2/MPEG1, 480x576 sized 4:3, leads to
768x576, video: 2.3 MBit/s, audio: 192 KBit/s, 80512656 Bytes), even though
my space is extremely limited. Be careful: These are really 80 MB for 4 minutes !!! This is very near DVD quality but I promise, you need a lot of patience to download it with a modem, just try it first when you have some bigger line (DSL, Cable etc.)... |
And now the story "How has it been made":
Everything has been made with a linux system, no windows system
has been involved (the same applies also to the development of
these web-pages of course). I can't "put my shirt" on the music,
it came directly from CHAPTER X and I don't know which
technologies they have been using for production. I ripped
it from their audio CD and began to produce the video for it.
Regarding the list of tools on this page: In fact you need
transcode, ImageMagick, gimp, the codecs and a player, that's
minimum. The list down there is that long because I wanted
to tell you about all tools I used, but it's not necessary.
Just some of them are really required.
Here comes the list of tools I have been used:
Transcode, the main tool, nothing goes without it.
The MJPEG tools,
these tools are essential for me because I'm heavy using
DV stuff.
Kino, again
DV processing. The DV format may produce big files but on one
hand big disks (100 GB and more) are not that expensive anymore
and on the other hand you can cut on a frame for getting perfectly
synchronized cutted frames.
dvgrab, grabbing
of DV devices directly to harddisk. Especially for this grabbing
you need lots of disk space (one hour is about 14 GB) !
The Gimp, important for
one step picture processing (I needed it a lot), logo construction,
every kind of picture processing etc.
ImageMagick, a perfect
tool for changing picture formats with shell scripts. You can also
use it as picture viewer. It's essential for picture-to-picture
processing with transcode.
XMorph, the morph sequences has been constructed with this tool.
NetPBM-Tools, ein package for
doing format conversions (pbm, pgm, ppm, gif, jpeg etc).
Audacity, an
audio processing tool, essential for pasting start- and end-sequences
together with main audio parts but also useful for other
audio processing ideas.
Avifile, a
library with player for AVI files of every kind. The package
also contains the AVI codec. It's a good tool for monitoring
the whole process of video edit (is the resulting file
audio/video synchronized or not).
MPlayer, a video
player, which plays not just DIVX and other AVI formatted movies
it also plays MPEG1/2 formats and the main goal is to play
any kind of video format. Cotains lots of video and audio
codecs (also many windows codecs).
You can find codecs for DIVX (Linux, Macintosh and Windows)
at http://www.xvid.org/
(free code development) or at
(proprietary/commercial codecs).
For creating VCD/SVCD-Video-CDs there's a Linux tool called
VCDImager. This tool
converts the MPEG file to a VCD image which you can burn with
cdrdao onto CD.
Although I won't/don't want to work with windows anymore
I'd never exclude users of such operating systems. :-)
The Windows Media Player should work with the right codecs
(see above, anyway, it can do MPEG1 without adding codecs).
Nevertheless it's better to have a "free" alternative which
doesn't restrict the user's freedom. There's a tool that
can do everything you want and even more (it can play DIVX files
with more than one audio track without playing them at once
like the WMP does), it's called
BSPLAY. It may bee
free to download but it's a commercial product.
More informations about the video:
The creation of the video was very time consuming, I stopped
counting hours at 60. In total I'd say that I needed almost
120 hours of work for doing the whole thing. The recording
of sequences is not part of this time calculation but the
ripping to disk belongs to the calculation.
The tool transcode has been extremely helpful for having some
nice effects like the blue-red-change- or the black'n'white-effect.
I had not as much to to with those effects than I had to do
for inverting scenes (newer versions of transcode can handle
even an inverting automation with an effect filter now but I
didn't want to change versions during production).
This was amazing !
Even the problems that I had at first in the MPEG area (regarding
sychronization between audio and video stream) have been solved
now, it looks quite perfect. Nevertheless, the MPEG1-stream has
the worst quality of all 4 and is almost the biggest one (the biggest
is the SVCD version, counting in bytes).
I also did a MPEG2 file
which should suffice most of all quality demands. It has been
made with a video quality of 10 MBit/s and an audio quality of
224 KBit/s which is equally to DVD material. I'm sorry, it's
impossible to present this file because it's extremely huge,
about 320 MB. But the SVCD file mentioned above seems
to have an equal quality (at least there are no differences on TV).
At least we can say that an Athlon XP1900, 200 GB harddisk and
a DV/firewire card can be used totally as video studio. And the
software still remains free.
Calculating € 30 for an hour of work, adding € 2500
for the PC the result would be at € 6100 for the complete
production starting at cutting work. Ok, today there's a lot
of work to do for recording the video first. But in the near
future you can be sure that more and more stuff will be
produced just directly on a computer. And the used
software costs € 0 !
At last (for those who are interested), here comes a list of
places where the movies and pictures have been taken:
Las Vegas, some US-american deserts (Nevada/California/Utah/Arizona),
Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Teneriffa, Leipzig and Berlin.
I did all of these recordings with an
analog sony camera.
The ship that happen to appear in some scenes has been desribed
here.
A big thanks goes to Larry Geralds who told me about this link.
I'm not a copyright fanatic, if some of you
likes to use some sequences for themselves I wouldn't have any
problems with it as long as you mention my name. :-)
I just want to say again: Selling the whole video on any kind of
media is prohibited ! If there's a distributor who's willing to
spread it just email me for getting a contract !
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