Production Process

I thought it would be useful to talk about my production process so that people can post ideas on improvement, or even use the ideas from here in their own projects.

This is how it generally goes.

Recording
Olympus C-8080 is used for recording the video, sat on a tripod and set to High-Quality mode. On a 1Gb card I tend to get around half an episode. So I'll generally record the beginning and end segments, and then download, go back and do the first big segment, and then do the same for the second. The audio is all captured using the Nokia N810, using the handsfree kit. This isn't the best way of doing things, but it's far better than trying to use the Olympus to capture the audio.

Lighting
The lighting process has evolved even in the two episodes that have been released. I now use the room lights, and 2 standard uplighters.

Preprocessing
The video is pulled into kdenlive as is, but the audio goes through a process in audacity to clean it up and make it sound as good as it can. Currently I first of all do a normalisation, then a noise reduction, and then an EQ. The EQ was a result of the audio sounding very tinny. Consequently I pull up the bass and take down the treble.

Titles
All the static titles, and slide-ins are done in inkscape and saved with the same resolution as the video, as png files. This allows them to have a transparent background, making them perfect for title slide-ins. The main intro was video put together in kdenlive and exported at high quality dv format.

Compositing
Putting it all together is made easy with kdenlive. I usually have two video tracks, and two audio tracks. Segment videos will usually go on vtrack2, allowing the slide-ins and segment cuts to be placed over the top on vtrack1. As each video is imported, it is trimmed in kdenlive to make sure it starts and finishes in the right place.

The audio components are then dragged in too, and synced to their video counterparts. Then I start putting the video transitions in, and brightening any video segments that are too dark.

Encoding
This is still in testing, the files are far too big at the moment, I have been given some pointers as to how to change this, but kdenlive generates the final files and is supposed to compress them down ok, but I get sync problems in mplayer.

So there is an overview of the process. Questions and comments welcome ;)