Video News – April 6, 2009

Monday morning – a great time to quickly look back at the last one and forward to the current one.

Last week:
I authored, duplicated, thermal printed, and assembled 300 figure skating DVDs for the Sunset Skating Club. Many of the DVDs were personalized with their name on the full colour DVD cover. See a sample here

I hosted an executive dinner meeting for the BCPVA at my home. On the menu was 3 roasted chickens (1 honey garlic and 1 teriyaki), scalloped potatoes, and asparagus. Following the meeting we extended an invitation to John Romein from TM Media to join the executive to fill a recent opening. Welcome aboard, John.

I captured, time-coded, and transferred to DVD – 14 x 2 hour hi8 and VHS tapes for a life story documentary.

This week:
I’m completing the French subtitling of a conference video. This process required transcribing the English video, translating the transcription to French, inserting the French translation as subtitles over the original video, and then exporting the video into shorter web video clips. My 13 years of French immersion schooling is sure paying off on this project, as although I hired a translator for the translation portion, syncing the French transcription to the English video requires an understanding of the material so that timings are accurate. I also was able to spot and fix few errors in transcription due to an improperly placed or missing comma in the original transcript, which changed the meaning of the sentence.

One of the tools that I used to assist with the transcription was the speech to text recognition tool within Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Although not perfect it did save a lot of typing on my end I when I reviewed the initial transcription all I had to do was to insert punctuation, capitalization, and fix the incorrect words.

My new appreciations:
After a slow start with my Matrox RT.X2 LE, I’ve grown to appreciate and have now fully integrated this Matrox hardware solution into my Premiere Pro CS3 editing workflow.

The realtime previews, accelerated export, and accelerated encoding made a big difference on my French subtitling project as I had almost 500 individual titles covering the entire timeline. Using the RT.X2 LE meant I didn’t have to render my titles or my transitions and reduced my editing and exporting time significantly.

I’m looking forward to reviewing a new Matrox training DVD that the folks at Safe Harbor Computers were kind enough to send me. The title is Matrox RT.X2 Revealed 4.0 and is hosted by Matrox expert Jeff Pulera. If you have ever browsed any of the Matrox forums you will know that Jeff is an expert when it comes to all things Matrox. The 4.0 refers to the fact that the training is both for Premiere Pro CS3 and the new CS4.

The other Matrox feature that I used last week was the Matrox timecode function, found in the effects bin. I used this to display the timeline’s timecode on my 28 hours of video-to-DVD transfers, before returning them to my client. My client can now create a shot-list using the onscreen timecode that will match what I have on my own timeline.