Homemade Movies Nineties Style

The Technological Date

Whatever other uses electronic gadgets may have, at least they should be good for getting you closer to women. A guy at our office likes to create digital home movies of his girlfriends--complete with music soundtracks. Experience tells us the impact of a high-quality video tribute is substantial and often provokes a romantic response. And if that relationship doesn't work out, the effort can make a lovely parting gift--or just one more thing to put on your Web site. Here's what our digital moviemaker suggests you'll need to get started.

Video Equipment

Consumer-level camcorders such as Hi-8 or VHS are fine for your moviemaking tasks. Add a VHS or S-VHS VCR to your setup for video output and taping.

Computers

For use in digital video production, Power Macintosh and Pentium-class computers are the best. Although you can use older Macs with NuBus architecture, it's best to operate with newer PC or Mac PCI systems. They're much faster and provide better playback and capture performance.

New in the digital video environment is FireWire, an input-output standard that offers digital transfer from digitally driven devices (DV camcorders). Make sure your monitor provides NTSC or PAL display capability, and the larger the monitor display, the better.

Hard Drives

For data transfers, a one- to four-GB drive should be sufficient for short video production. For longer videos, consider a nine-GB drive and possibly an array system.

Ram

The more memory, the better. Although you can make movies with as little as 16 megabytes, it will be excruciatingly slow. Better to start with at least 32 to 64 MB and move up from there.

Video- and Audio-Capture Hardware

Look for cards that offer at least 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 resolution and that capture 15 to 30 frames per second, with composite input and output.

Video-capture cards with audio capture are preferable, but if yours doesn't include it, make sure that your Mac or PC has a factory-installed audio card. Otherwise, you should purchase one that can capture 44kHz, 16-bit (CD quality) audio. A pair of good stereo speakers will round out this package.

Software

Although there are a number of video software packages available, the new Adobe Premiere 5.0 is an example of an accessible video software with high-end technological capabilities.

Becoming a videographer and moviemaker has never been easier.

dvd digital video disc

All across America, in every office and every cubicle, people want to know when they can get DVD drives for their PCs. And with good reason: DVD is the ripest scam for corporate layabouts since the advent of the CD drive, which allowed us all to bring our Beatles collections into the workplace.

Alas, the DVD transition won't be quite so simple. While the CD-ROM drive contained everything that was needed to spin "The White Album" (as well as that phone database), a DVD-ROM drive can't play video without a lot of support from your computer. Cheap Macs and low-end Wintel machines are out: Only Power Macs and midrange Pentiums need apply. More important, though, DVD video relies on the MPEG-2 format, which for now is processed with special decoder hardware. Several developers promise software-based decoders. But unless your computer is so fast that switching it on causes every dog in the neighborhood to bark, there'd better be an empty slot in there somewhere.

If your boss falls for it, though, you'll be set for one of the best possible viewing environments for DVD. Only a truly exceptional video monitor can render the high fidelity and resolution of a DVD image as potently as can a computer screen, which was, after all, engineered specifically so you could easily see that a speck-sized H isn't really an E.

Still, even without the video frills, DVD-ROM is an intriguing proposition for the PC. When formatted strictly for data purposes, a single disc can hold as much as 16 gigabytes of information, roughly 25 times the amount stored by a standard CD-ROM. What effect will this have on data publishing? After all, it was once impractical to try to sell a complete national phone directory; CD-ROM allowed every listed number in the country to be collected on a pair of CDs. Five years after DVD-ROM takes root, you may be able to not only find the phone number of a long-lost classmate but also pull up a stored satellite image and make sure his house isn't more expensive than yours.