Showing the Work

Class assignments are sometimes fun, sometimes hard, and sometimes late. Too often we watch students work franticly in the labs only hours before a class eager to finish a project then finally, depressingly, they realize it's going to be another hour to burn a DVD of it all – too late. Compression takes time. Yes, we do have real-time DVD burners, but you don't get a menu with it and they're sometimes hard to duplicate.

There's a slight disconnect between finishing a project and outputting it in a viewable format. In our wonderful world of widening formats where you end up isn't always obvious. As I've said several times, in the old days – last year – we were almost always going to end up with a tape as the finial destination, but that's not necessarily true today. If you've been working in HDV you might not be able to hand an HDV tape to a faculty member and expect them to watch that at home. You need to make a more universal and easily viewable product. Is that a video DVD, a data DVD with a QuickTime movie on it, a flash drive with a QuickTime movie, or even a CD with a QuickTime movie on it, or upload it to YouTube and watch over the internets. The answer is yes, pick one, pick all.

OK smarty, which one do I do first and what's the fastest and best looking. Enter the Turbos. In the Advanced Media Lab we have ElGato Turbo.264 USB sticks inside all of the computers. They're small hardware accelerated compression devices that output H.264 QuickTime movies. If you're still in Final Cut Pro you can export your movie by going to File> Export> QuickTime Conversion and finding the settings with Turbo listed next to the name. Then press the Options button to change any of the settings. I like the iPod High settings, but you do have to actually try them to see not just the quality of the image, but the resulting file size. You'll be surprised by how small your movie can end up and still look great in the process. If you want to view your work in a large window use the Apple TV settings. 

If you've already exported a QuickTime movie or have a reference movie you can open the Turbo.264 application from the dock and drop your movie onto the window.  It has a nice interface that shows how fast it's encoding and how long it will take to finish. The only constraint is that the ones in the lab are only for SD projects. I have a loaner one in my office that you can borrow that does HD, but it only runs on Intel machines so you have to work in the Inter-Media Lab: B-5, for that.

So while I always say USB is too slow for video, it's pretty terrific for these little hardware sticks. Give it a try.  You can also batch process your movie and select the best format after all of them have been exported. In the opposite direction it's also a good way to sweep all of your work from the year onto a single disk for your semester or div II portfolio and don't forget to send a copy home to show mom. She'll love it.

Maybe she's shooting in HDV also, wait, it's better than that. She gave you the camcorder you're using and she bought a new one. Your mom's shooting in full HD and you're stuck in dinky HDV. And you thought you were so hot with this new stuff. Man, your mom's got it all down tight. She's savvy enough to buy the sharpest gear and have fun with it at whatever level she wants. If we want to beat your mom we all need to get faster, quicker and deeper than we ever thought possible, because we're up-against some stiff competition – your mom's shooting HD. It's "the new modern world".

gunther