Embarking on your first journey to create a video montage for a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah, quinceanera, or quinceañera may at first seem like an exciting adventure, a journey west to new lands that seem open and welcoming…

And then you come across those hostile terms.

4:3; 16:9; wide screen; full screen; NTSC; COMRADE; dpi; fps; drop frame; no-drop frame; High Definition; standard definition; matter; export; HDMI; rca; S-Video; component input/output; Mpeg4; Fast time; WOW, oh my god!

Words, numbers and foreign slang come flying at you in a way that will make your head spin!

Fortunately, this Thanksgiving, I’m here to help you make peace with foreign terms; help you sit around the video montage presentation table with abbreviations, numbers, and terms like friends, ready to fluently speak technical topics. Of course, at least well enough to know how to pass the filling.

In this first part of the series, I’ll focus on getting you started and on your way to creating the montage itself, saving the discussion of editing, mastering, and projection for the ongoing series of tutorials.

So, roll up your sleeves and get your pencils or keyboards ready!

No matter what software you use to create your video montage presentation, one of the first things you may come across is choosing between NTSC or PAL. Here in the US, most systems will automatically set this to NTSC, with PAL being an option you can switch to. Whose. Unless you’re creating this montage for someone to play in a country outside of the United States, you’ll want to stay in NTSC. This is the video system that was created here decades ago when television and the broadcast system were invented.

American engineers developed standards to make equipment compatible and have maintained these standards through the evolution of the motion picture and video industry and its product lines of cameras, television, broadcasting equipment (cable, satellite), and systems. of ever-improving software delivery, such as VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. Back then, the Europeans followed the US and developed their television system in a similar way, slightly improving some of the standards, although the difference is relatively inconsequential. For example, instead of 24 frames per second (fps), your cameras run at 25 fps. The difference only serves to make your computer incompatible, which you may have noticed if you traveled abroad and tried to play a DVD on a foreign DVD player. It doesn’t work dude!

The next option you will likely come across is whether or not to set your project to 4:3 or 16:9. Your system may also ask this question in another way, such as full screen or wide screen. 4:3 and full screen are essentially interchangeable in this case, and the same goes for 16:9 and widescreen.

To put this simply, 4:3/full screen will create your video montage project closer to a square, the kind of shape older TVs have, while 16:9/wide screen will create your video montage. project in more than one rectangle. shape, the kind of shape on new TVs where it’s wider, more similar to a movie screen.

Here’s the thing. For video editing presentations, any option is acceptable.

You may be thinking, “Well, I want to move to 16:9 as my beautiful high-definition widescreen TV.”. I’m from the present, not the future, I’m not stuck in the past with an old TV with bunny ears sticking out of it.“

Well, hold on a second, mate.

Which way you choose is best determined based on the material you are using for mounting. Chances are, 4:3/full screen is a better option for you most of the time, and I’ll tell you why. If you are working with historical video footage that has been shot over the years, most or all of that footage will have been created in 4:3/full screen. So if you set your project to widescreen, it will just add those black bars to the sides or stretch the image to fill the wider screen, which will make your wife look fatter, which is certainly not going to help your relationship. .

Basically, the same is true for photographs. Most of the photos you’ll work with for a montage are closer to 4:3 than 16:9, although some cropping will be required for either. However, cropping becomes more challenging for 16:9 when a photograph was taken in portrait form, meaning taller in the hand like a standing person, rather than wider. Picture frames often come ready to be placed on your table in any way to fit the direction the camera was turned when you took the photo. For a montage, when it’s a portrait photo, if you want to see the entire photo, you’ll have a lot of black space on either side, and even more so with 16:9 than with 4:3.

But if you’re creating a montage that relies primarily on freshly shot video, captured with a high-definition video camera, then chances are the footage is already widescreen, or as I would correctly say, “natively” 16:9. In this case, choose widescreen for your format, also known as aspect ratio. Photos will be fine cropped at this size, and with portrait shots you can crop out a 16:9 section of the shot or deal with black bars.

Don’t worry: whichever format you choose, your montage will play just fine on all TVs, projectors, and the Internet. The shape will adjust in slightly different ways to fit the way it is displayed.

This format issue brings us to your next choice. High definition or standard definition. Once again, you may be thinking of creating your HD montage so everyone can see just how great your family really looks… every smile, wink, and dimple.

But the same questions are still valid.

Is the source material you are working with high definition? This question is primarily for video footage, because photos can be high resolution and look impressive in HD, assuming they were originally taken at high resolution with a digital camera or scanned from a high resolution print, which which in this case is known as dpi or dots per inch (the higher the dpi number, the higher the resolution). If your video footage was shot not in HD, but in Standard Definition (essentially good quality before HD), it won’t look any better if you create your project in HD. In fact, it might look worse if it’s stretched to fill the widescreen format that HD requires. Some TVs and DVD players promote their ability to “up-rez” to high definition, but the reality is that the quality of your video image will never improve, it can only, at best, maintain that quality when upscaled. to a larger size. .

The other downside to editing your montage in high definition is that it will require more memory and a faster, more powerful computer to process the data while you work. This can actually slow down the editing process and lead to a higher level of frustration. How new is your computer and how fast is the processor?

So if your video is a standard definition video, it probably makes more sense to create your “standard definition” montage. When I cover projecting your montage in a live event later in this series, this same discussion will ultimately come to a conclusion as to which projection form best suits how the montage was created, in terms of aspect ratio and High Definition. standard definition Suffice it to say that if you’re projecting your montage from a standard DVD, it can’t be high definition anyway.

And if you plan on uploading the montage for viewing on YouTube, again, standard definition will be of high enough quality, and in fact, it will most likely rezz from there. Once you go HD, you have to go all the way to the finished product and presentation to enjoy the benefits, otherwise you wasted your time worrying about HD for nothing! Remember, even if you’re doing a simple photo montage with no video footage, you still need to think about the end game that projects this into your event, and the project needs to be set up appropriately based on how it will be displayed.

Your editing system may also give you an audio configuration option. Some do, some don’t. If you need to choose between non-drop-frames and dropped-frames (which affects both video and audio), select Drop-Frame as this is probably the best option for most video applications that don’t require you to work with footage. on actual film, i.e. 35mm or 16mm motion picture film. The other audio setting options can be a choice between 48K or 32K, 16-bit or 12-bit. All are acceptable, however given the options I would recommend going with 48K and 16-bit. Rather than give a technical explanation on this, I suggest you nod your head and take my advice. On more home-based non-professional systems (which may work fine for your purposes), these options may not even appear.

Your project is now set up, most likely you are working in NTSC and have chosen 4:3/full frame or 16:9/widescreen and are ready to start creating your montage. However, before you begin to channel your inner Steven Spielberg, you must first include the material in your project. Namely still photographs and video footage, and on most systems this will be a variation of the term “import”. A common thread for importing video is the ability of most video cameras to connect directly to your computer via a firewire cable, allowing direct import of video footage into your project.

If the footage was created digitally, converting the digital files to the format needed by your editing system will also be a function of the import. Each system will have its slightly unique way of doing this, with PC systems and Mac based software approaching this in their own way, and unfortunately this series would get unwieldy to explain all the different programs out there and the different settings for get your stuff. charged and/or accessible.

So, like following a Julia Childs cooking show, you’ll have to go find all the ingredients yourself and put them on your table, and then in the next part of this series, you’ll be ready to start learning how to cook your soufflé, either only of the photomontage type, or a montage that combines photographs and video.

Happy Thanksgiving and happy editing!

Stay tuned for Video Montages Tech Talk Tutorial part 2…