Hints and Tips
This is our miscellaneous Hint and Tips page. - Any important hints or tips about what we do and how we do it are posted here.
World Domination.
While you are infiltrating the entire world to build your vast secret underground
complex of inter-connected recording studios and virtual radio stations, it
is in your best interests to ensure that you are not discovered before you are
finished and that you stay out of trouble. As expertly and elequently explained
in the film, "The Princes Bride" by the first arch-baddy character,
'The greatest blunder is to start a land war in Asia'..... So DON'T.
Tiddley Winks
While the game of 'tiddley winks' has a name as a generally safe game of minimal
risk, we are aware of people who have sustained severe injuries during tiddley-wink
tournaments. To avoid such serious injuries you should at all times stay calm,
regularly stretch your legs (to avoid deep vein thrombosis) by having a quick
walk around between games, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you get bored and
start doing handstands against a wall. -You could slip and compact your spine.
-No really, we know someone who this happened to.
Close personal friends of the Alien who can remember who it was in our distant past who suffered this rather silly and painful injury will recive a free drink if they remember the persons name correctly!
Video Editing on
PCs
Until recent years,
doing proper video editing on home PCs was simply not possible. This situation
has changed more recently as digial video MPEG encoder chip sets have been built
onto video capture cards by a number of manufacturers and computer peformance
has massively increased.
By configuring a suitale PC and including one of these modern video capture
cards, it is now possible to make fairly proffesional quality videos in your
own home on your own equipment. But there are still a few points that are worthy
of note if you want to acheive a powerful system that doesn't drop frames and
is easy to use.
So here are our recommendtions based on our experiences with building the Crazy
Alien video editing suite!
Use Adobe Premier.
Having tried various video editing packages we can heartily recommend our prefered
choice of Adobe Premier. This package takes some learning but can produce fantastic
results, provided you have the appropriate drivers for your hardware. This is
best acheived by buying a video capture system that comes bundled with Premier.
The Pinnacle cards often come bundled in this way, (our DV500 plus certainly
did) and the drivers use Pinnacles on-board hardware acceleration to reduce
the time taken to render the pictures, and can often perform the edits and effects
in real time, straight from the time line. This makes the system easy to use
and you can very quickly see the results of your edits. In systems without hardware
acceleration this process can be very slow and frustrating, so this is a key
point in building a good system.
Use a RAID array.
A RAID array is a Redundant Array of Independant Discs, and is a method of using
multiple hard discs in your PC. The most useful configuration for home video
machines is the RAID0 configuration, in which it allows you to operate several
hard discs in parallel, so that they act like one big fast hard disc, big and
fast enough to do video editing in fact. Without a RAID array, your average
hard disc is barely able to keep up with the high data rates required for video
work. And if the data rate to and from your hard disc isn't fast enough, your
video can appear flickery or jerky as it struggles to keep up and drops entire
frames fom the output video stream.
And if you drop frames when you are capturing data then those frames are lost
forever and so your only option is to try to re-capture the video or to accept
the jerky footage that your faltering system captures.
So our advice is to use an identical pair of modern fast hard discs (7200RPM
models) and to configure them as a RAID0 array. Our resulting system has played
back two hour videos without dropping a single frame, and has never dropped
frames during video capture. It basically works! Which is fairly amazing really.
Don't pack the PC full of
games etc.
Erm, this is a good piece of advice, which we have generally, (but not always)
followed, much to our regret. It's far easier to keep the system working if
you get the vital software applications installed and working and then Don't
Install Anything Else. - Unless it's a tool required to do a new editing job
or simliar task-related item.
Otherwise you are likely to experience awkward prolems such as we recently have
in the Crazy Alien video editing machine.
Our present problem is an application that crashes when you run it, unless you
first run other applications in specific order.... and it's infuriating! The
problem is that the system now carries many different versions of the same software
DLLs on it. - And certain applications require certain versions of certain DLLs
to function properly. Our culprit is MFC42.DLL, and we're still experimenting
with various work arounds to get our 'Impressions' software to work correctly.
So don't put non-essential software on the system, it's just not worth it.
More hints and tips to follow as we think of them!