Video terminology
Aspect ratio: simply put, the ration of the frame's width to the frame's height. Standard definition video and television (and films before the 1950s) were typically set to an aspect ratio of 4:3. Films, wide-format digital video, and HD video, typically use as an aspect ratio of 16:9.
B-roll: secondary shots created to complement th main audio and video tracks. "Shooting A/B -roll: Tips for Single camera A/B-roll Shooting" refers to an older analog video setup, but still illustrates successful B-roll video shooting with a single camera.
Cutting to the beat: there are many occassions for using this technique, not just when you are making a music video. And, there are many techniques for achieving good results. Usually, it involves some variation of placing markers on the timeline to match the beat of the music, then adjusting your video edit points to match the marker locations. "Control-V to the Beat" is a good tutorial on this process.
FPS: frames per second
Letter boxing: adds black bars at the top and bottom when a 16:9 video images is shown in a 4:3 video frame.
Masks and mattes: we saw a brief demo of one example of masking technique in class. To get a more complete introduction to these powerful tools, visit Ken Stone's site for "Using Matte Filters in FCP" and more good tutorials.
NTSC: 525 horizontal scan lines for television broadcast at 30 fps.
Pillar boxing: add black bars to the left and right sides when a 4:3 image is shown in a 16:9 video frame.
Progressive vs. interlaced video: progressive (often indicated with the letter "p" displays the entire image at once), interlaced (often indicated with the letter "i" alternates the display of every other line of video).
Transition time: the amount of time "stolen" from the adjacent video clips to accomodate a transition; in other words, the amoung of time that a transition overlaps the video clips on the timeline. Be sure to leave yourself enough time at the beginning and end of each clip to apply any transitions.
Video formats: DV (digital video, 720x480), SD (standard definition), HD (high definition, such as 1080i, 720p)
In this class, we will generally be working with NTSC-DV, commonly recorded to MiniDV tape, with an image size of 720 x 480 running at 30 fps, in 16:9 aspect ratio.
Looking forward, you can expect the video format picture to get more complicated, instead of simpler.
Video resolution and size: 72 dpi. There is a fixed video size associated with every video format; unlike film and computer monitors which typically display more information at larger sizes.
Video signals: analog (composite, S-video) and digital (4-wire or 6-wire FireWire, IEEE1394).
Video standards: NTSC, PAL, SECAM.
Other web video concepts to be discussed:
- players (wimp, qt, real, flash) pros + cons
- file formats
- streaming vs. downloadables
- bare movie windows vs. embedded displays
- framing and skinning the video player window
- making video accessible: transcripts, meta data
- making video usable: marker points, hyperlink tracks, alternate audio tracks
