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Viodi View Newsletter - January 11th, 2006

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Essential Digital Video- A Book Review

By Ken Pyle, [email protected], Managing Editor, Viodi View

Even though it was written in 2004, The Essential Digital Video Handbook feels very current. The author clearly has a pulse on where things are going, as well as where they have been in the video production industry. His experience behind the camera shines through in the number of useful tips that he peppers throughout the book. There are a generous number of photos that help bring the words to life. This is a good book for learning subtle techniques to give videos a professional look.

I enjoyed this book because there were quite a few tips that are common sense, but not obvious at first glance. The book could have spent more time on how to post video to the Internet, but, in general, he covered all of the technical aspects of producing video. This book is a good complement to the Digital Videomaker – Guide to Digital Video and DVD Production, reviewed in the Viodi View last year.

Here are some of the tips I learned from this book:

• I liken picking equipment for video production as like picking a baseball glove. It is a pretty subjective. He provides a nine step test for doing a camera comparison, which could prove very useful, though a bit time consuming.
• Film a minute of room buzz to get sound ambience, in case you need it later as filler.
• Put on a white paper on the lens cap to give an easily accessible surface for setting white balance.
• Suggested that one holds a frame for 10 seconds before starting a pan or a tilt.
• Gives the recipe for making fake blood. Yes, you can try this one at home.
• He uses different audio tracks for each person, music, sound effects to make it easy to account for the different audio.
• He suggested that audio should be ramped up and down to prevent sharp edges which would be noticeable on high-end speaker systems.
• Look at the audio meters during the entire edit to make sure they stay within range.
• For short sound bites, he suggested reading it twice to determine the length of time associated text should be kept on the screen.
• Suggested that fonts should be 18 point minimum.
• I would have liked for him to discuss how to film a digital clock. Does the clock have to be synchronized somehow to the camera?
• One idea that wasn’t in the book, but came from a conversation Roger Bindl and I had was that a multi-camera shoot of a high school sporting event could be synchronized by connecting FM radios to the audio input to each camera. The different videos could then be synchronized by lining up the audio spectrums on the edit timeline.

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