Editing the iPhone Video

Right, so, we went to Geek Terminal on Tuesday to see the iPhone. Specifically, the iPhone that Paddy Tan of BAK2u brought in to develop his anti-theft software. Here are some reviews or mentions of it by Kevin, NTT, and Kai Yi.

Today, after Daniel passed me the DVR, Kai Yi and I were to start editing the raw footage. Because of GT's blessed power strip, we didn't take as long as people usually do to plug all our plugs in and set up our ad-hoc workstation. Everything we needed was there, IEEE network card, firewire cable, laptop with good specs, and all we had to do was to... ...

Import the video from the DV tape.

In this aspect I realized Kai Yi was just as clueless as I was, because like the independent and resourceful big boy that I am I was expecting Daniel to rip the raw footage out to digital format and pass it to me. But he made a point that since he only had Windows Movie Maker, he could only record to WMV format, which can be restrictive. At least Adobe Premiere Pro (APP) records to AVI. Among other formats, anyway.

So we were kinda alternating between staring stupidly at the laptop and fiddling stupidly with the camera. Luckily Daniel over at NDP wasn't doing a very busy job today, so he could reply promptly over SMS to guide us. We didn't realize we were supposed to let the tape run, and let the Firewire live-feed it into the laptop and digitally record it from there, in real-time. Terribly memory-intensive stuff. We had recorded one loooong iPhone clip and one short intro clip. So when we were getting ready to move out and Kai Yi was transferring the files from his HD to my HD, we didn't really flinch at the 230MB file. Then when we checked out the long file...

It was 4.6GB. GIGABYTES.

Ah well, with high quality comes a high price.

We started to realize how inefficient we were at APP as soon as we got ourselves past editing the intro clip, which took us rather look considering it was like what, 30 seconds? Because I had to warm up after not touching APP for so long. It's a good thing that as far as the editing aesthetics were concerned, Kai Yi and I seem to be roughly of an equal mind. It eased my mental load (and my biological RAM was overclocking) without having to worry about whether this or that method was fine by him.

Or maybe he just didn't voice it out. :P

We didn't know how to make subclips out of the Great Wall of China that was our raw footage (assuming subclips = small portions of a larger clip. Dunno whether that's the APP definition). So to put segments together we had to keep dragging the whole damn clip down and trimming like 98% of it.

Someone please advise... -_-"

On another note the food at GT was great. I thought I made a mistake ordering Aglio Olio, especially after seeing Kai Yi's carbonara, but I asked for cheese to top, and holy shit the cheese was some powerful stinker! But a moderate dusting on top of my meant-to-be-plain dish made is sooooo delectable. I felt so much love for the cheese I took my own initiative to return it to the waiter at the bar myself, so he could put it back in the fridge. I was half afraid, probably because of the stink, that it would turn black and gooey and rot before my eyes. That's not the way you thank someone you know, by leaving them to rot in the searing heat.