AV News 197 - August 2014
V id e o F o rm a ts
Howard Gregory
Re Peter Brown's article on page 19 of Issue 196.....
I recently had to show a set of sequences which had been produced on
a Mac, presumably using video editing software, as the sequences arrived
as .mov video files. My version of Windows Media Player (in Windows 7)
wouldn't play them and, like Peter, I resorted to VLC media player with its
attendant traffic cones and messy starts and ends.
However there seems to be another way. I put the whole .mov file (about
300MB) into PTE as a ‘movie clip’ ie there was just one item on the timeline.
Setting the project options and producing an .exe file in the usual way
resulted in an .exe file which behaved just like any other .exe file. I couldn't
detect any loss of quality.
This may be a way of avoiding the messy ‘resizing starts’.
C a te g o rie s - H e lp o r H in d ra n c e ?
Howard Gregory
These thoughts are intended to promote discussion - they are not aimed at
any particular competition or sequence.
What are AV competitions for? To reward excellence? To rank work in order
of quality? To encourage others? Hopefully all the above. But do we always
do that? Identifying first, second, third, highly commendeds, commendeds,
special mentions etc may be a difficult task for the judges, but it is an easily
identifiable task, understood and accepted by all.
However, many competitions have categories - 'Theme', 'Documentary',
'Humour' etc. It is entirely possible that, say, the best humour is worse than
the worst documentary, but the awards will elevate it to the same status as
the best documentary - raising false hopes in the author who then cannot
understand why his humour sinks without trace in the next, differently
arranged, competition.
Incidentally, humour is regarded as one of the most difficult genres to pull
off successfully. It often relies on surprise - you think you know where
something is going, but there is a sudden and unexpected twist in the tail.
So whose idea was it to kill off the surprise element by telling everyone in
advance that it is supposed to be a humorous sequence?
First, second and third tend to be regarded as 'higher' than 'best in
category', so, depending on how the categories fall, 'Best Documentary'
might indeed be 'Best documentary' or it might be 'second best,' 'third best'
or even 'fourth best.' Again, false hopes can be raised in the mind of an
author. Someone not knowing the full story may question the judges'
judgement.
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