Continuing on with my DIY theme, I’m focusing on video conversion – something every journalist is going to need in the future. By no means a comprehensive source, but should be enough. Stop me if you’ve heard this.
There are far too many video and audio formats which modern electronics spit out, and getting them into a usable format for your editing programs can be tricky at the best of times.
Ok, first, the example.mpg is called the file extension or format. Just so you know.
Now go download a copy of Quick Media Converter from Cocoonsoft, install and learn to use it. This one is free, passed web and my own virus and spy-ware scans, and can convert to and from most formats (all that you’ll need) and is relatively easy to use.
There are a host of other crap programs on the net where you can convert perhaps a couple of formats and almost all of them are ridiculously priced for what they do. I think I finally found a decent free program.
Of course there may be issues on various operating systems, hopefully not yours. I’m running Windows Vista with 1gb ram and centrino duo processor and I haven’t had any trouble with it – maybe an occasional crash.
Converting video files can consume quite a lot of your computers resources as it needs to buffer (cache (remember)) the file as it converts it, plus run it through. Your computer will slow down a lot during conversion. If your computer sucks don’t think it’s going to run nicely.
Windows Movie Maker is not as great as industry standard programs, but I’m doing this on a student budget. Sometimes free tools are all you need. Speaking of free tools – you should get Audacity and train up on that. It’s essential to know how to use that when your making video. Do it. Do it now.
Different devices record video in different formats. My camera spits out .mov (or Quicktime) files, and my phone .3gp videos, both unacceptable to WMM. Using QMC they can both be turned into WMM friendly file types, pretty quick.
From what I can see WMM doesn’t mind .mpg .mpeg and .wmv so go for those. With a bit of experimenting you’ll see which formats work best. You will never use half of the formats on QMC unless you have iphone, nintendo wii, ipod touch, psp, ipod or xbox – handy to have if you need them I guess.
Other devices record to .3g2 (in phones), .mpg or .mpeg (mostly in cameras) or possibly even .avi video or .mp4 video. Why can’t they all be the same? I wish I knew.Theres a hell of a lot of formats out there, more than any journo needs.
Converting between certain file types can produce results ranging from terrible to fantastic – but you will normally lose a bit of quality each time it is converted. Just experiment with the different formats and see how they come out.
Youtube videos are in .flv (Flash Video) format. You can download those, but be careful with the copyright etc. Tip: Once the flash video has downloaded, rename the file with .flv appended to it then convert with QMC. Works a charm.
Got that?
