Once we have all the custom footage we need it's time to compile all the clips we need, and if needed pull stock footage from one of our countless tapes in our climate controlled film/video vault.
It may surprise you to learn that we don't work in DVDs but rather Beta tapes. In fact, only recently has the industry started to change their accepted archival medium from Beta to that of the digital file and hard drive storage. These tapes are of high quality, and durable to boot, making them perfect for archival.
Booting up the Media 100 software on our computer, we must now digitize all of our desired footage. This process is the most time consuming portion of the editing process, the digitization process working in real-time as opposed to the instant drag and drop process of a digital file. To cut back on time, we usually only digitze the full tape for our custom shots, and digitizing pre-selected clips from stock tapes.
The Media 100 software now allows us to use the clips we have digitized and manipulate them in any way we wish. We can create further clips from them, drop them into the timeline as-is, or remove the audio, or even video from the selected clip to suit the needs of the video. A second program, Adobe After Effects is often used for various motion effects for still shots and moving fonts.
Once the program is complete we can export the file as an .MOV format to our "Podcasts" folder. Now it's time for the second most time-comsuming process, encoding for the internet. Since the Media 100 and our Cleaner XL encoding software work on the same codec, Media 100 must be close, but we're done editing anyways so it's ok. While .MOV files are fine on their own, we find that MP4 files are much better suited for YouTube posting. For our actual Podcast Feed, the file must be further encoded to an .m4v file before being uploaded to our ftp server online.
The finished product is now able to be uploaded and promoted across the internet for all our visitors to see. But our work is never done, no time to rest, time to work on our next podcast!
