If you’re old enough to remember shooting home video on little reels of film, and using a razor blade and scotch tape to do the editing, simply cutting out and throwing away the frames that were worthless…. than you can relate to part of this article. If you’ve grown up in the digital video era, you might not understand being concerned about which frames of a video are seen versus those skipped over.
With a magnifying glass you could see each frame and make the cuts exactly where you wanted. Those days of analog video editing were pretty exact….. a clip with 74 frames had exactly that number. You could see each one and count them if you wanted.
Most tout digital as being more precise and exact… files and frames made of a batch of little plus and minus /on or off symbols, things too small to see even with a magnifying glass, and too complex to understand even if you could see them. That takes away the ability to know exactly what frames are in your video files.
Digital viewers or players are now needed to see the frames of a digital file. That sets the stage for all kinds of issues. If a file comes from a digital camcorder and doesn’t play at all, is the issue with the file or the player? Ask anyone online and join in on the discussions about things like codecs.
File Issues
In this article I'll skip over the codecs and initial viewing, and go to the next level…. are you seeing each of the frames in a file? How do you know? If not, why not? Here’s a few cases from the Windows environment.
- Movie Maker 1 in Windows Me and XP showed each frame of a source file
- Movie Maker 2 introduced lots of features to add eye candy in the form of special effects and transitions. To keep the project preview playing smoothly, it shows every other frame. That one frame blip of a flash that is so obviously in the saved movie might or might not be seen in the project editing environment, making it hard to surgically remove.
- The newest Microsoft Expression Encoder 2 is a wonderful tool to convert 100 different file types into new wmv ones. It’s installed on my XP and Vista laptops and I’m starting to explore it. My check to see what frames of my little test file are seen when I preview it frame by frame show not all are included.
- Pinnacle Studio 11 and VirtualDub shows each numbered frame.
My test file is online, free for the downloading. It’s a DV-AVI file with each frame numbered. Analog people start with #1 when counting. Digital programmers start with #0, so a clip with 100 frames goes from #0 to #99. Download a copy, check your players and editing software, and let me know what numbers you’re missing, or seeing twice.
Test File
Picture Credit:
Film Strip: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamed/407909486/