Producing Video? Buy This Stuff

If you’re creating any type of video for the Web, you can wrestle against it, or with with it. Obviously, you’ll want to do the latter. And to work with it, you’ll need to make the flow as easy as possible. First, buy yourself a camcorder that records onto SD cards. It can be standard or high-definition—these days even standard definition looks darned good for the size you’d post on a Web page. The advantage of SD cards is that you can then use iMovie or Final Cut (Express) to import the video directly from the card. More importantly, you can review all the clips from the editor and decide which ones to import. This will save you an enormous amount of time: the clips move quickly just like any file transfer, and you can leave out bad takes, goofs and glitches that would never make the final video. Now, after editing, you have to put the video into a compressed format for the Web, and here are two more tips: buy yourself an Elgato turbo.264HD encoder, and sign up for a really high-speed ISP, who provides ~10 Mbps service. The Elgato encoder looks like a thumbdrive, plugs into a USB 2.0 port, and will cut your encoding time by hours. I’ve encoded some 8-minute videos in 90 minutes using FC-Express, but with the Elgato encoder, it takes only 15 minutes. Nice! It works through a stand-alone application to encode video to H.264, but also slips right into the iMovie/Final Cut option menus to let you encode directly from the editor, too. I can’t wait to see how it works on my MacBook Pro laptop. And then lastly, who wants to wait while a 200 Mb video taken a hour to upload. With a 10 Mbps upload speed from your cable provider, it takes only minutes. Now you have spare time to go back and make another video.