NUS Chinese Dance Promotional Video

Have been rather too busy to update my blog. Here’s the end-product of something that I’ve been busy with:

It’s a NUS Chinese Dance promotional video that is was being used for the Freshman Welcome Tea that is gonna be held was held on 15 August. Soundtrack is Happy Valley by Vanessa Mae, as was recommended by Jing Wen. She was the one who initiated the idea of creating such video. This lady is a real slave driver as she kept reminding me of the impending deadline.

Then again, like she said, it’s amazing what stupid things people do for things that they like and have passion for.

For the curious and technical, here are the tool used for the video:

1. Handbrake was used to extract the videos from various performance DVDs. This is one of the tasks that just needs time; lots of it.
2. iMovie HD was used for bulk of the editing. Realized that there are a lot of limitations; it’s quite unlike my (limited) experience with Adobe After Effects. Didn’t like the fact that iMovie creates separate .dv files for each of the movie clips that I imported. This consumed my hard disk space like some hungry monster. Grrr~
3. iMovie ‘08 was launched when I am in the midst of editing. The new scrubbing feature named “skimming” could really reduce the time I spent in screening through the individual performance items. By the time I manage to get my hands on the program, all the editing was completed. But I was glad to see how easy it is to add in titles as compared to iMovie HD. So I got iMovie to export the project in full quality and proceeded to add the titles using iMovie ‘08.
4. Keynote ‘08 was used for all the animation of static images/text. This is a presentation program to be reckoned with. I am considering abandoning Microsoft Powerpoint for all my future presentations. The ease of creating animation and impressive transitions is refreshing. And so is the ability to export the whole presentation as an .mov clip.

I was really tempted to delete the iMovie HD .iMoviePoject file as it is a gargantuan 22GB file. Luckily I did not and I was able to shuttle back to iMovie HD for some last minute edits when the slave driver needed it. Conclusion? I need more hard disk space so that I need not worry about huge video editing projects.

iMovie HD: Where the bulk of video editing is.

iMovie ‘08: Where the individual titles are added.

Keynote’08: Notice that the animation of photos flipping through contained 39 images in all.