Staying Current with Post-Production

Videomaker by John Ross

For video and film post-production, things were pretty stagnant for decades. In video you edited linearly, tape-to-tape from one deck to another. In film, you cut pieces of celluloid and taped them together to create edits. Currently, most editors have to upgrade their hardware and software on average every three years just to stay in the game. With high definition and the expanding number of codecs and standards, upgrading is now simply a part of life in post-production and effects video editing.

Delivering It

Since the millennium, people saw the writing on the wall about changing from the reliable, standard definition formats to HD. The problem for most of us came in the form of proprietary hardware and codecs (compressor-decompressor). When Panasonic went with its own 1280x720 DVCPRO HD format versus Sony's high-end 1920x1080 HDCAM, and the prosumer level went to HDV, people were suddenly inundated with choices - many thousands of dollars in choices that may not be deliverable to clients or anywhere else.

In the years since, the NLE (Non-Linear Editing) software for video editing has compensated by accommodating all options, as well as a lot of Web delivery systems being better able to take in a variety of formats. The standardization is now in the delivery formats. So we can now edit natively and deliver our content in a more common format. This makes the choice of video creation software your most criti cal spending decision. read more...