Produce Movies Yourself – SoBeStyle

By SoBeGirl’s Erik

Click here for "The Machine’s" Specifications

You've come a long way baby

Desktop Digital Video Systems are an enormous step into the future. They allow personal computer users, like you and I, to perform what used to be difficult computing tasks quickly, economically and efficiently. In the past, large studios and production houses alone handled video production projects because the cost for the technology was greater than the average consumer could afford.

Today, personal computers are both cheap and powerful enough to complete these projects with ease. You can now cheaply and easily transform your home into a complete video production facility with software and hardware purchased right off the shelf for a lot less dough than you would think. And with a few easy to read instructions you will be creating video masterpieces of your own in less time than it takes to zip up your fly, or pull up your skirt J . It is much easier than you think and all it takes is simply giving it a try.

Moore's Law is Always Correct

The necessary hardware and software for video editing and post-production has become, and is becoming more and more affordable every day, both literally and figuratively. The prices seem to be dropping monthly and this is good news for both video experts and wannabees alike. As anyone who has been watching SoBeGirl grow over the past year can see, we have been capturing, editing and rendering our own videos from the start.

Dot Com Crash is Good for Porn

In the beginning we were doomed to fail by those disenchanted naysayers claiming the world is not ready for video. Broadband is but a distant dream and bandwidth is too expensive. Well, just as I predicted a lot has changed since then. Cable and Phone companies are subscribing broadband users by the millions. You can now get Satellite Broadband complete for less than 500 bucks. The collapse of the dot coms has left huge bandwidth pipes under utilized leaving lots of cheap bandwidth for the On-line Adult Industry to gobble up. Once again "Porn" to the rescue! And SoBeGirl has been doing video for the Web from the start. That is all we do and we know it well.

Any Production Environment has A Process

In order to succeed we had to develop a video production process, which was powerful, cost effective and efficient. We had to have the best machines a small company could afford and we needed the right combination of software installed on these machines to get the job done. Finally we had to configure this system so that all the elements worked together without crashes, IRQ interrupts and other tragic meltdowns so warmly associated with Microsoft.

The SoBeGirl Video Editing Studio (The Machine) and the directions covering how and what to do (The Process) are the culmination of over a years hard earned experience which I am going to share with you here and now. From the beginning I always wanted to lead all sorts of people into creating their own videos so they could send me the tapes for final rendering. Today nothing has changed with this plan and I am not just talking about porn.

Enter the Producer

Sure most of what I do is to produce Adult videos. But by using the same "machine" and the same "process" I could easily make videos of my little niece’s first bike ride, my best friends wedding, my Grandma’s 89^th birthday or, little Muffy standing on her back legs while I hold out a piece of cheese. The video you choose to create is up to you and limited only by your own imagination, but as always the process stays the same.

Now, what about this machine and process I have been talking about…..

Click here for "The Machine’s" Specifications

I am not going to come out here and give you a sales pitch in-order to get you to by this system. If you don’t want to produce video than perhaps you just want a powerful machine completely configured for a low price. Maybe you know a bargain when you see one. If you want to produce video then this is your chance to get started, get the tools, get the guidance, and get a great deal. For 2,700 dollars the SoBeGirl Video Editing Studio is the world’s most affordable PC video platform, pre-configured with everything you need to start producing your own broadcast quality movies and output them to VHS, CD or DVD.

It is the perfect blend of fast hard drives, a powerful processor, proper video and sound cards, drivers and easy to use software all wrapped up into a cool looking mini-tower case. Throw in a 15" flat panel display and you truly have the most bad ass affordable video editing system available on Planet Earth.

How to Do What You Do

And because it comes from SoBeGirl you know that if you have any problems or need any help we are here for guidance - as always. Both the hardware and software are endorsed and being used by SoBeGirl to create our new video productions every week. Also included are step-by-step instructions showing you where the "process" starts and where it ends. Video Production 101 does not get any easier than this.

Video projects are created in several main phases. First of course you must acquire or capture some action occurring over a segment of time onto a tape. The tape can be Hi-8, MiniDV, VHS or some other format. To keep this simple I will assume that you are going to use a digital camcorder (see paper on Video Recorders) perhaps some lighting and hopefully one or more hot models.

The Process – A Year in the Making.

Getting familiar with your camcorder will save you hours of editing time making you more productive. This usually involves avoiding camera shake and stopping the recording when the action has stopped. It also involves understanding how your camcorder sees light that, is very different than the way, your eyes perceive light. (see the light article). As you get more comfortable with the camcorder your editing tasks will be minimized requiring you to chop less and less out of your final production. Planning the shoot out in your head before hand also is a good idea. If you have to write down what you want to do then go ahead so that you can refer to it later on during prime time.

After capturing the footage you must move it from the camcorder to your computers hard drive. To satisfy the requirements of this stage the SoBeGirl Video Production Studio comes with the Dazzle MPEG2 hardware encoder. The MPEG2 file format is high enough quality for DVD output and perfect for archive storage. Hardware on board the Dazzle card digitizes and compresses the video from the camcorder in full frame 720x480 30 frames per second (fps) in real-time.

Real-Time Compression

Without real time compression into the MPEG2 format an uncompressed AVI would have to be stored on your hard drive taking up enormous amounts of disk space. For example, a 10-minute uncompressed AVI could gobble up as much as 2 gigs, while a 10-minute MPEG2 will be around 400 megabytes. Some people like to work with uncompressed file formats because they feel there is less file degradation but I have not found that to be a factor in my work so far.

Editing MPEG2 files is a snap using the included Ulead Video Studio 5 and the TMPGE software, both of which have been designed to take advantage of the powerful Pentium IV and Rambus memory. All of this we will get to in a minute. It is really an amazing task performing so much compression in real time at such an affordable price. You simply hook up the camcorder to the Dazzle card, press play, launch a Dazzle application on your PC and click capture. You can watch as the card digitizes the video into MPEG2 and writes the compressed data to your hard drive.

I recommend that you capture only 10-minute segments at a time even though the system will support 2 gig MPEG2 files sizes. Keeping the files to 10 minutes or less makes editing easier as the computer does not have to cache so much in memory each time you seek to a different point of time in your video. 5 minute files sizes will make your work go even faster but you will have to stop and start the capture twice the number of times. The choice is yours. Once you have all your video digitized and saved on your hard drive you can now begin to edit it.

It is in Your Approach

How you approach editing your video will depend on what you plan to do with it. SoBegirl produces adult video so I am not really concerned with fancy transitions and special effects. Since you are reading this article on an Adult Resource Center I will conclude that you also will be producing some adult content as well.

I am usually thinking in terms of production speed, which means I try to streamline processes and work quicker. Furthermore, I need to distribute video content in one-minute files. When rendered to MPEG1 these files will be anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 megabytes. Small enough for the 56k user and quickly downloaded by the broadband user. I can chop the files up into one minute clips automatically with a software called M-2 Edit but, then I will get cuts that occur right in the middle of good scenes. I would rather eyeball the cut using the Merge/Edit tool in the included TMPGE software.

Free is Good - TMPGE is Free

Whoever said good things don’t come for free never used the freeware TMPGE. Written by a Japanese programmer living in Japan it is the best tool available for simply chopping one-minute clips out of longer clips. Why clobber all my systems resources with a behemoth application like Adobe Premier when all I want to do is just chop? At under 3 megabytes of disk space TMPGE fits the bill very nicely.

After I have all my videos chopped up into the one-minute clips I then delete the long ones I originally captured and free up some disk space. I don’t need them any longer since they contain unedited footage. If I want a long form video I just string the one-minute clips together using TMPGE Merge tool. I could theoretically then port the long form video out to VHS tape and distribute to the largest adult video consumer market there is.

Checking Your Tracks

But be aware. Before you delete those unedited clips first play back some of the one minute clips you spent time manually chopping. There have been instances where all was going well, but upon playback, the one-minute clips showed up blank. I can’t explain why it happens. Perhaps some bug in Windows 2000 or perhaps I was surfing the Internet while I was editing video, but it is phenomenon that occurs once in a while. Going back and frequently checking that your files are not corrupted will save you some headaches in the future.

In the last step of post process editing I send some of the clips to Ulead Video Studio for watermarking. One of the best new features in this Version 5.0 of Ulead Video Studio is the ability to place a graphic layer over the movie. You can create a logo for your website and place it in the corner of your video clip. This way even if your production is stolen your URL will still appear. Ulead has one of the simplest interfaces creating an extremely narrow learning curve. After your MPEG2 is watermarked you ship the CDs to SoBeGirl for final rendering. We will give you MPEG, ASF, Real or Quicktime files in the perfect speeds and frame sizes.

We Live in a Prolific Time

Today, an inexpensive computer can do some amazingly powerful tasks. The SoBeGirl Video Editing Studio is transcending some old norms. Specifically extending video production capacity to the masses. Now are you ready to shoot that wedding? That sporting event, those two hot chicks eating each other out? Then get this system...

Use the "machine" and the "process" to produce your own video and avoid the maze of hardware settings and potential IRQ conflicts which are always part of the terrain when configuring video editing workstations.

Click here for "The Machine’s" Specifications