My friends and I filmed a short film a few weeks ago. I edited it and it's avaiable for download. We are planning to do a second part, but that's kind of besides the point.
As of now, the movie has no music. I do not want to take a copyrighted song. So I was wondering if anyone on here was interested in making custom music, a roughly 2 minute high intensity rock/techno song. I'm really looking for something other than midi, but if that's all we can get and it's good enough that will work. You can download the movie at my site: http://cmk.drunkenkangaroo.com
i directed it and jeremiah starred in it, along with another friend. jeremiah is the guy in the cap. you can see me, i'm one of the tennis players in the beginning.
Thanks Grazzum. Can you show me some samples of your work? Just to make it clear by custom music, I mean music that kind of fits the intensity of the video. Soft and slow in the beginning and building towards the action.
Heh, not bad.
I also made a (sort of)funny short film, but the file is very large...
Anyways, not bad. But I can't make music. Hooray for useless little me!
The content above makes absolutely no sense. But I guess you've already figured that out.
That was a quite funny movie. Too much playing on the road though. More of the changing locations (and wall jumping ).
I have a few technical notes to the movie:
1. The video stream is compressed with Cinepak which is both old and stupid. Use a modern MP4 codec to archieve better quality/size ratios. Use DivX. www.divx.com . Even the free basic codec can compress at good quality allthough the pro version compresses in a little better quality (decompression is same for pro or non pro). You can get a free version of pro too, but it installs some adware that delivers adds (it is clearly stated on the website!).
If you cannot compress with DivX in the program you use, you can use VirtualDub www.virtualdub.org .
2. You use a camera with mono sound, but you have a stereo track in the movie! This means the sound recorded with the camera is played in the left speaker and silence is played in the right! It also means that you use twice the bandwith needed! And dont use uncompressed PCM sound! The right channel (which contain no real sound) takes up 19 MB! So specify a mono track for the movie and save 19 MB! That way the mono (left) track will be played in both speakers. Also compress the sound with MP3. Visit: www.mp3-tech.org look under "encoders" and download the windows codec of "LAME MP3". It is the best free MP3 codec around to encode MP3 (has quality like a $$$ codec). It can decompress (play) as well of course.
3. About music. Whenever people make fan videos of eg movies (starwars, matrix etc) they use copyrighted music, persons, events etc from those movies. It may not be interely legal, but it is generally accepted by the copyright holders. So you could basically do the same. Use copyrighted music in your movie (as long as it is not commercial of course) and write in the credits, that the music was used without written permission in a non commercial project (also credit the makers of the music). Basically copyright holders do not mind as long as they dont think you put their name or products in a bad light. Trust me, if they think so, they will let you know!
Try to think about the alternative. Do you think copyright holders could bother to give out written permissions to everyone who would like to use their music for free in a non commercial project?
To demonstrate what I meant I took the movie into VirtualDub.
Compressed the video with DivX 5.1.1. Quality: slow. Datarate: 780 kbps. Psycho visual: fast. Source preprocessing: light. Encode as: progressive.
Sound changed to mono. And compressed with MP3. Datarate: 64 kbps.
Everything else was untouched. Size: 15,2 MB. That is quite a difference from 69,1 MB! Even though I recompressed an allready compressed videostream (generally a bad idea) the difference in video quality was unnoticable. This means the videostream may be compressed even more (especially from the original less compressed source) resulting in an even smaller filesize.
^Man, thanks for all the advice. I was very aware of the horrible size/quality ratio, but I'm not very educated in the technical aspect of this. The program I use is absolute shit. For example, it only allows you to add in music from a CD, so... I have to burn any song I want onto a CD. I think the prog was written for morons.
Originally I tried using the standard codec that came with the program. The file size ended up being 292 MB! I'm going to attempt to use the software you recommended, but I might still need to ask you a few questions about it.
About the music, I would definitely not leave outcopyrighted music an option only because of legal issues. I'm not worried about that, since our project isn't commercialism. Mainly, if I could get custom music it could fit the movie better.
Since I have to start with the source being a project file, I don't think that I can open that in any thing other than my own program, so... I don't see how I can do anything other than use Virtual Dub to recompress it.
VirtualDub is not really a videoediting program ... its more a video compression program.
If the program you use is so awefull I would recommend you use another one! If you use Windows Xp you can download Microsoft Movie Maker 2 for free at Microsoft website (well surprise!). I have never tried it out ... but especially version 2 should be rather decent. And Im pretty sure it should let you use any codec installed on your computer (like DivX or MP3).
I do not know any other free video editors, but you can easily get trial versions (that often work like the full product). Ulead makes one (search for it). And there are more products.
If you do make it in the one you have export it in the best quality you can make (no matter how much space it takes) possibly some kind of codec that does not compress the video and then use VirtualDub to compress audio and video.
If you have any questions regarding VirtualDub or anything else, feel free to ask me, here, by DC mail or regular mail thats up to you. Cant wait to see more of your movie
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