Director's cut

Done! My first movie project is at last ready to be released for viewing by a selected few, that is, the first DVDs await distribution :o)

It sure took a while, but after nearly six weeks of editing, I finally got two cave diving documentaries strung together, as well as some extra videos, good for about 70' of wonderful submersion into darkness.

Into Darkness
•• Part 1 : Cave Diving (±35')
•• Part 2 : Underwater Speleology (±21')

Extras
•• Dos Pisos - A Walk In The Park (±4')
•• Temple of Doom - The Downfall (±33")
•• Cenotes - Another Look (±9')

For the record: Together, these five MPEG4 source videos only take up about 1.5GB, however, after having been processed & encoded by iDVD, they just barely fit onto a 4.7GB DVD?

Soundtrack

Got the first of two documentaries clipped together, with titles, soundtrack and credits, good for nearly 35' of infotainment!

To set the mood, I've chosen popular Mexican bolero-ranchera songs by Javier Solís and ancient Mayan music by Xavier Quijas Yxayotl.


For the record: Generating the actual documentary from my 24MB iMovie project took nearly one hour, resulting in a MPEG4 video file of 720MB with an interpolated resolution of 720x540 pixels.

Underground movies

So far, selecting the best takes from more than a dozen shootings in various cenotes, I've lined up a 38' sequence of otherworldly scenes for the first of two documentaries, showing what cave diving around Tulum looks like. Again, this being just a quick draft, some serious post editing is still needed, besides getting the sound on track.


As I only started to get a clumsy feeling for underwater videography after my high resolution camcorder flooded, most of my best footage was shot in low resolution with my three year old back-up camera. Meaning the two underground movies I intend to produce will be rather grainy. For a more detailed feel, I plan to release a separate wanna B movie clipped together from some of my initial shootings.

Wanna B movie

After sifting through several gigabytes of raw material various times, discarding useless footage and marking some of the better sequences, I've now roughly cut & pasted a pseudo-high-res wanna B movie of 12', which of course still needs reviewing, remixing and trimming, not to mention an appropriately dark soundtrack, before being released.

---

UPDATE: Re-cut some of my cave diving footage for public viewing:

→ Cave diving in Yucatan's cenotes [03/2008]

Screening

Importing the 8GB of high-res* footage taken with my defunct Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1000 on its first and only six cave dives took over 90'... but now I've got about 90' of MPEG4 source material neatly stored in my iPhoto library and ready to be edited into a wanna B movie with iMovie 08 on my iMac. That is, screening is in progress!

Since mixing high and low resolution footage within one movie is a really bad idea, I'll import the 14GB of low-res* footage taken with my Sea&Sea DX8000G later on, as soon as I've got an external HDD.

Video editors

Apple computers come with iLife, a multi-media suite of inter-related applications, one of which is iMovie, a user-friendly video editor that just might do the trick for me - especially in conjunction with its predecessor, which offers some more functionality.

QuickTime, Apple's free multi-media player can be upgraded to a Pro version (30€) for some added functionality like audio & video capture, editing, conversion, etc.

For more advanced editing, Apple offers ambitious amateurs Final Cut Express (199€) and professional filmmakers Final Cut Studio (1149€). FC Studio is definitely beyond my means and abilities, but FC Express might be an option for me as wannabe moviemaker.

Adobe's Premiere Elements (94€) is supposed to be a pretty good entry level video editing tool, but unfortunately there's no Apple compatible version, as there is for Photoshop Elements (88€). Premiere Pro CS3 (919€), just as FC Studio, is way too expensive for me. Note that professional grade video editing also requires some serious processing power beyond your average consumer desktop.

→ Video software for Macintosh

1080i viewing/editing issue

Sanyo's Xacti VPC-HD1000 being my number one candidate, I've cross-Googled it again and again to get as much elusive data about it as possible, finding out some rather disturbing facts along the way.

For example, it does not seem possible to view, let alone edit, Full-HD 1080i content taken with this camcorder on a Mac. At least not without some hacks and/or additional codecs (see: Steve's Digicams Sanyo forum or e.g. this Apple discussion forum).

I wrote Sanyo Germany an email asking them about this issue, but they just gave me a non-answer and forwarded me to Apple:

Sehr geehrter Herr, Wir danken für Ihre Anfrage und können Ihnen diesbezüglich folgendes mitteilen. Da die im Lieferumfang der Sanyo VPC-HD1000 Digitalfilm Kamera enthaltene Software, mit der Ausnahme von QuickTime, ausschliesslich für die Betriebssysteme von Microsoft ausgelegt sind, können wir Ihnen leider nicht die gewünschten Informationen bieten. Vielleicht kann Ihnen Apple, in dieser Sache, Näheres sagen.
Mit freundlichen Grüssen, Ihr Sanyo Support Team

Apple? Surely they must be kidding, Apple support basically consists of redirecting any problematic customers to its self-help group-therapy discussion forums.

On Sanyo's other Xacti VPC-HD1000 site, it does mention in small print that "1080i movie playback is not guaranteed" on the included QuickTime 7.1 movie player from Apple. So much for Sanyo Germany not knowing anything about this issue. (note that QuickTime is freeware and that the included version is not the latest)

So, I sure hope I can get my hands on a VPC-HD1000 soon, in order to take some sample material for further private investigation.

UPDATE: As mentioned in Steve's Digicams Sanyo forum, downloading and installing avc1decoder partially fixes this problem. That is, it enables viewing of 1080i clips with QuickTime and editing with iMovie '08, though the latter is not as smooth as with 720p clips.