David – Page 117 – Just thoughts

A sequence of anxious emails from my daughter following her discovery that many video clips appeared to be missing following a migration from a PC to a Mac platform caused me to investigate what had gone wrong, and whether there really was a problem … or not? This is what appears to have happened.

All the video clips HAD been copied over, but only the ones whose format was acceptable to iPhoto were viewable in that library. This only came to light when she noticed they were missing from Lightroom after an import from iPhoto – a process described here. Of course iMovie can only read MPEG-4 (MOV) files so they didn’t appear there either!

This raised the issue in my mind of what should you do with video clips to preserve them. An easy solution would be to post them all to YouTube or Vimeo, I suppose – but that seems to be a bit OTT for a clip 15secs, or so, long, and yet that 15secs might represent a really valuable memory that you wouldn’t want to lose. So … what workflow should you adopt for video clips? What practices should you adopt to ensure your snatched clips are retained for posterity?

The first thing that occurred to me, was that it’s very important to distinguish between cataloguing and editing your video clips. Yes … I know that’s obvious but it needs to be re-stated as the workflow that you adopt depends upon the decisions you make on storage and cataloguing. I love Lightroom because (like Picasa) it catalogues your media wherever it’s located in your file system. It doesn’t need to bring all the media together into a single place as iPhoto, Photoshop and others do, and which then lose the individual files inside a catalogue (or database). This approach enables you in Lightroom to have different catalogues looking at different slices of your media collection without creating copies (and taking up disk space). However, if you don’t use Lightroom … I would recommend following the following three golden rules:

1) Keep your video clips in a different folder on your hard disk from your photographs, or images;
2) Convert the clips to MPEG-4 as soon as you’ve imported them, if they aren’t already in that format;
3) After editing (in Movie Maker, or iMovie) always ensure you save, or export the finished movie as MPEG-4.

These three simple rules should ensure that you won’t be left with clips that you can’t read, view or edit as technology moves on.

So if you’re a Lightroom user the import into the Lightroom catalogue is a good decision, especially since it supports a wide range of video formats. [NB It doesn’t support WMV files however, so you’ll need to do a conversion of files if you’re moving from Windows to Mac and want to import files from that format, and its worthwhile doing the conversion for all other formats at the same time into MPEG-4. For this, I recommend Handbrake – but more about that later.]

However, you what you can edit in Lightroom is limited, therefore you need some way of accessing these clips so that you can edit them in, for instance, iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker. I would suggest that means you need a well-organised file-store and also a way of clearly identifying video clips inside your Lightroom catalogue. Luckily, you can do this very easily by creating a Smart Collection in Lightroom which identifies files with given suffixes. You should then export these to a temporary folder to allow format conversion (eg AVI to MPEG-4), and then import into an editing programme. [NB You can only rely on iMovie supporting Apple’s flavour of the MOV format, eg from the iPhone/iPad, so conversion of anything else to MPEG-4 first is a sensible precursor to the import.]

So how do you do a conversion to MPEG-4 or MP4? I use, and recommend using Handbrake – as mentioned above. Although the dashboard you’re presented with looks a bit daunting, the defaults are designed to produced high-quality MP4 formatted files. It appears at first that you can only select one file at a time to convert, but that is not the case since if you navigate using the Source button to the folder where your video clips are (that’s why I mentioned exporting the files to a temporary folder above if the files werre already in Lightroom), you can then select “Add All Titles to to Queue …” from the File tab. The re-formatted files can then be imported back into Lightroom and the originals deleted – again using Smart Collections.

This post has focussed on the Mac and using iMovie, but if you’re a PC user I would recommend using Windows Movie Maker which is a very effective and easy to learn package and which you can use alongside Lightroom as I’ve described above. If you aren’t a Lightroom user then follow the golden rules above. Above all … don’t leave any video clips in any format other than MPEG-4 if you want to be sure of retaining compatibility for the future.

Way back in September, we managed to grab a couple of days free time to go down to stay in one of Rick Stein’s places in Padstow. It was the second time we’d visited and we stayed in the same place – St Edmunds House, and in the same room even – we’d liked it so much the first time.

This time was to be a bit of a mixture of ups and downs. We enjoyed our meals, especially the fish and chips, and the Italian meal we had at Rojano’s in the Square. We were a bit disappointed by our meal in the Seafood Restaurant, and the ceiling and wall of our room was in serious need of remedial work to the plaster. A shame … but that need not have been any reason to spoil the break. What did spoil it was watching a Range Rover reverse into our car in the hotel car park! On the plus side, I was able to get the drivers details and everything’s now been fixed. On the minus side it completely spoilt our first day when we drove down to Newquay and then made our way back up the coast by way of Bedruthan Steps – a stretch of coast owned and managed by the National Trust which I’d never seen before.

It was here that I got out my new camera – the Sony A7r and started learning how to use it. Fortunately it’s not that much different from the A700 and NEX-6, so I was soon snapping away. Here are a couple of images of the beach and the wonderful dry-stone walling of the area.

Back in Padstow, we took the ferry across to Rock and walked through the village before stopping at The Rock Inn for a drink before returning to Padstow.

The previous night we’d had a great meal at Rick Stein’s Fish and Chip Shop where I had the most delicious piece of Hake – fast becoming my favourite fish in batter. Tonight we were due to have a meal at the Seafood Restaurant which was not as great a success as the previous time we’d been – Jenny’s dish in particular suffered from from a far too generous helping of pepper which drowned out all the other tastes. Our next day’s outing was to walk up the Camel Trail to Wadebridge.

It wasn’t a great day (weatherwise), but we saw lots of birds including a colony of egrets perching in trees beside an inlet – very strange! We went to Rojano’s on the Square for supper that evening and I can honestly say I had the best pizza I’ve ever tasted. Splendid meal, lovely wine too, and we dined al fresco on the rooftop gallery. Lovely!

The next morning I was up very early to take pictures (if possible of the sunrise). I was in luck. Apart from the image of Padstow Harbour at the top of this post, the image below is my favourite …

… or perhaps this one …

… well you can see all the ones that I’ve already shared on Google+ here

Our departure for Cardiff was by way of Wadebridge to pick up a mirror, that now is on the wall at our front door, and then by way of St Teath – which has the most interesting graveyard and a lovely church with loads of history – to Camelford for lunch at The Masons Arms – quite an enjoyable experience! After lunch we headed for Tintagel – it was many years ago that I last visited – and another chance to use our CADW (English Heritage) membership. It was a bit of a rushed trip because we suddenly realised (when we were down the bottom of the hill) that we hadn’t put enough in the car parking meter machine. So Jenny went back almost immediately and left me to take a few pictures. Some of which are below.

Apart from the nuisance of the damage to the car, it was a good break and worthwhile in determining to both of us that we ought to make more effort to get down to Cornwall – out of season. Roll on April and our trip to the Isles of Scilly.

Author: David

What do you do with video clips?

A couple of days in Padstow