The following is the conclusion of a three-part series for the beginning to intermediate eLearning content developer. It's designed to teach, from the ground up, how to add video to content for eventual delivery on the world wide web. If you missed the first two parts, I recommend you start with the first article, Part One: Setting Up for Success.
Part Three: Capturing, Editing and Encoding for Delivery
Last week you learned to shoot your video. What now? You've probably got a lot of footage in your camera. The next step is to transfer the video from your camera to your editing station. Nowadays, this step is pretty automatic. You open up the software, create a new file, attach your FireWire cable (FireWire is a cross-platform implementation of the high-speed serial data bus that can move large amounts of data between computers and peripheral devices) to your video camera, and click Import. If you've been using a mini DV camcorder, this step might take a while. On the other hand, if you've got the big budget and have been using a High Definition video camera with Flash memory, this won't take long at all.
Once the import process is complete, you have the raw footage ready to go. Save it, and back it up somewhere.
While editing techniques and practices are really outside the scope of this series, let's look at a few things to get you started.
Most editing software has a preview function. This is the palette that contains a preview of your raw footage. Even if you shot in relatively low fidelity, going through that footage can be very costly in terms of RAM usage, meaning your computer will begin to run very slowly. Fortunately, you should be able to lower the percentage of your preview, from 100% to, say, 50%. This will let you know what you are previewing without getting so detailed that your computer responds slowly.
The next step is to cut the raw footage down into the pieces that you need. You might want to backup the entire raw footage onto a portable hard drive or other inexpensive media for later use, or simply for posterity, but only keep your new, slimmed down clips on your editing machine. This will help speed things along, and you don't want your hard drive cluttered with rarely used, giant-sized video files.
Try to keep things as short as possible. Keep in mind that your finished video will be deployed over the Web. Longer videos usually mean longer load times or buffer under runs. If you have your choice between two takes, choose the one that has a shorter run time. That is not to say, however, that your editing should include rushed takes, or takes where the actor speaks too quickly. Just make sure that you trim time where it makes sense.
Don't overdo the special effects and graphics. You might run into some situations where "dazzle" is appropriate, but for the most part you won't need too much of it. I find that typography that looks good and a nice background is all I typically need. You want the learner to pay attention to the entirety of the script, not the graphics.
Once you are done editing the video, go ahead and extract the audio track, open it up in your editing software, and put on your headphones. Now that you don't have the video portion of your content to distract you, go to work on the audio. Save a copy, as always, in case you go a little too far. The important thing to remember, and something that really divides professional product from amateur, is that your audio collateral is just as important as your video collateral. Make sure you take the time to make it sound right. Pull out things you don't like. Augment things you do like. If it calls for it, put a very subtle filter effect on a particular word to emphasize it (be careful here, it's easy to go too far). Up the bass a little if you like, or lower the mids.
Listen to the audio with your eyes closed to get a good picture of what is going on in your mind's eye. This simple step can be the difference between a decent piece of content and an award-winning one.
Once you are done, bring the audio back into your video editor. Make sure that your timeline ends on a full second. Some encoding algorithms trip up on clips that don't end on full seconds.
Save your project and render it out with some good settings. This can be relatively high quality, as the next step will encode and compress. You want something here that you can archive and re-encode later if the need arises.
You want the rendering to be high-enough quality that if a client needs something on a DVD for a presentation, you can use it for that. For example, if I was using Adobe After Effects to render my movie, I might render it at "best" quality at 29.97 frames per second as a QuickTime movie with animation compression (I commonly change animation to H264) and the audio at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit stereo format. This will give you a good rendering which you can archive.
When the rendering is done, ask a team-member to watch the movie. A second set of eyes is crucial at this point. You want to make sure that everything makes sense and your team-member will undoubtedly see something you didn't, or hear something you didn't.
The final step is encoding your movie. The industry standard for eLearning content is the Flash Video (FLV). Why? FLV's are platform independent, are a brilliant codec that gets files small enough for rapid transit across the Web, and is the native video format for Flash, which is a tool pretty familiar to most eLearning developers. FLVs also integrate seamlessly with the native video capabilities of Captivate.
When encoding for Flash with the Flash Video Converter you want to be aware of a few things. First, the lower the bitrate, the lower the quality of the final video. Second, compressing your audio will make it sound a little weird. These are two things that you have to balance for yourself, usually via trial and error.
A general rule of thumb I follow is:
- On2 VP6 video codec
- Custom quality at 300 kbps
- Frame rate same as source
- Audio at mp3 64 kbps mono (this can change to a higher bitrate and stereo if you need it, but the file size will go up)
- Crop and resize as needed. If you are delivering in a piece of Flash content, you want to size this to your player within Flash. If you are using it in Captivate, you are in luck. Captivate helps you resize this on the fly!
- If you didn't do it before you rendered your movie, your duration should be shaved down to the nearest full second if possible. Take a little off the front and a little off the back if you need to.
That's about it. Your movie is now ready to be delivered on the Web. Go out there and make it happen! I realize that the information presented in these past three articles is a lot to digest, but you'll get through it. Video is in demand, and all the tools you need are out there. You just need to add your own perspective and make some interesting content!
I hope you had as much fun with this series as I did. And please don't hesitate to email me with any questions.
About the Author:
William A. Collins Jr. is the Creative Director for Multimedia Development at Learning Evolution. An honored graduate of San Diego State University, Will has a B.F.A. with emphasis in Graphic Design. Will infuses the entire creative department at Learning Evolution with the ideal blend of art and science. He brings a professional, abstract and friendly demeanor to all his work. Will enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife Carolyn and their one year old darling daughter, Molly Jean.
About Learning Evolution:
Learning Evolution is a recognized leader in providing best of class customized eLearning and performance improvement solutions available to clients on their Learning Management Systems and Portals. In addition to eLearning services, Learning Evolution provides in-house video and audio production facilities and expertise.