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How have other videographers made use of green screens for special effects?

What one “trick” in pre-production planning do others find most important?

What’s the coolest music video ever made and what lighting techniques can be gleaned from it?

You have questions and Videomaker.com has answers. Well, Videomaker.com and Videomaker readers. The editors and experts at Videomaker field questions every day on shooting, lighting, special effects, gear, editing, and every aspect of video production. And we always do our best to answer these questions either on-line or through high-value content in our magazine. And here at Videomaker we have the luxury of working day in and day out with our peers, fellow video enthusiasts just like our readers. But what if you’re working independently or are just starting out or otherwise need the help of your peers in the field in addition to your peers here at Videomaker?

Turn your Artwork or Photos into a "video slideshow" using Movie Maker 2.0

If you have a series of images on your computer, say, from a digital camera, you can turn these pictures into a video. Movie Maker 2 has a storyboard mode that makes it really easy to turn your photos into a “video slideshow.” Simply import your photographs and drop them onto the storyboard in the order you prefer.

After you’ve placed your pictures, you can do a bunch of great things to your photos to spice up your video presentation:

Rearrange your pictures.

The storyboard shows little thumbnails of your pictures – this makes it easy to rearrange, move, and delete pictures from your movie. Just click on the thumbnail with your mouse, and drag it into position.

Rotate your pictures.

Some of your pictures may be rotated wrong (if you held your camera sideways for a vertical photo). Fortunately, Movie Maker has a series of rotation video-effects that will fix this. Simply open up the Video Effects collection, and drag the rotation effect onto your picture in the storyboard to make it right-side-up.

Fix your pictures.

The video effects that come bundled with Movie Maker will all work on your pictures as well. That means you’ll be able to perform basic photo manipulation … for example, you could lighten or darken your pictures if they aren’t exposed properly.

Add transitions.

You can add transitions between each of your pictures by dragging the transition effects onto the storyboard. Most of the included transitions are rather “over-the-top,” but they look great with pictures.

Add music or a voice track.

You can easily add a music track, or narrate your photo video. You’ll need to do one of these things because your movie won’t have any sound otherwise.

video

They included the following: "Keep the girls under 13, in fact, I really need to see 12 or younger to know your a brother," and "Don't avoid nudity in previews. I will NOT accept you, if theres no nudity."

In addition, the most exclusive area of the site was reserved for members who could provide content that showed children suffering. "If the girl looks totally comfortable, she's not in distress, it does NOT belong I this section."

Members were also segregated according to the degree of original content that they provided, or the degree to which the administrators trusted them. Classifications included "Super VIP," "VIP," and "Member." According to one user's guilty plea, the "SuperVIP" level was reserved for those members actually "producing child pornography and posting homemade child pornography to the bulletin board."

Video formats

Stereoscopic

Stereoscopic video can be created using several different methods:

• two channels — a right channel for the right eye and a left channel for the left eye. Both channels may be viewed simultaneously by using light-polarizing filters 90 degrees off-axis from each other on two video projectors. These separately polarized channels are viewed wearing eyeglasses with matching polarization filters.
• one channel with two overlayed color coded layers. This left and right layer technique is occasionally used for network broadcast, or recent "anaglyph" releases of 3D movies on DVD. Simple Red/Cyan plastic glasses provide the means to view the images discretely to form a stereoscopic view of the content.
• One channel with alternating left/right frames for each eye, using LCD shutter glasses which read the frame sync from the VGA Display Data Channel to alternately cover each eye, so the appropriate eye sees the correct frame. This method is most common in computer virtual reality applications such as in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, but reduces the effective video framerate to one-half of normal (for example, from 120Hz to 60Hz).

New HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs will greatly improve the sharpness and detail of the two-color 3D effect in color coded stereo programs. The first commercially available HD players were expected to debut at the 2006 NAB Show in Las Vegas in April. See articles Stereoscopy and 3D film.

There are different layers of video transmission and storage, each with its own set of formats to choose from.

For transmission, there is a physical connector and signal protocol ("video connection standard" below). A given physical link can carry certain "display standards" which specify a particular refresh rate, display resolution, and color space. There are a number of analog and digital tape formats, though digital video files can also be stored on a computer file system which have their own formats. In addition to the physical format used by the storage or transmission medium, the stream of ones and zeros that is sent must be in a particular digital video "encoding", of which a number are available.

Bit rate (digital only)

Bit rate is a measure of the rate of information content in a video stream. It is quantified using the bit per second (bit/s or bps) unit or Megabits per second (Mbit/s). A higher bit rate allows better video quality. For example VideoCD, with a bit rate of about 1 Mbit/s, is lower quality than DVD, with a bit rate of about 5 Mbit/s. HDTV has a still higher quality, with a bit rate of about 20 Mbit/s.

Variable bit rate (VBR) is a strategy to maximize the visual video quality and minimize the bit rate. On fast motion scenes, a variable bit rate uses more bits than it does on slow motion scenes of similar duration yet achieves a consistent visual quality. For real-time and non-buffered video streaming when the available bandwidth is fixed, e.g. in videoconferencing delivered on channels of fixed bandwidth, a constant bit rate (CBR) must be used.

Video quality

Video quality can be measured with formal metrics like PSNR or with subjective video quality using expert observation.

The subjective video quality of a video processing system may be evaluated as follows:

• Choose the video sequences (the SRC) to use for testing.
• Choose the settings of the system to evaluate (the HRC).
• Choose a test method for how to present video sequences to experts and to collect their ratings.
• Invite a sufficient number of experts, preferably not fewer than 15.
• Carry out testing.
• Calculate the average marks for each HRC based on the experts' ratings.

Many subjective video quality methods are described in the ITU-T recommendation BT.500. One of the standardized method is the Double Stimulus Impairment Scale (DSIS). In DSIS, each expert views an unimpaired reference video followed by an impaired version of the same video. The expert then rates the impaired video using a scale ranging from "impairments are imperceptible" to "impairments are very annoying".