A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video

NOTE: A newer version of these guides can be found here.

Welcome to ErMaC and AbsoluteDestiny's guides to all things audio and video.

These guides are currently undergoing a major update. If you would like to see the new (but incomplete) versions you can do so by clicking here. Please help us with the Guide Beta Testing


- For a guide on how to do this on a Mac, see Red Wolf's Mac AMV guide.

- For reference, there is also a useful software list and a glossary of terms.

- If you are looking for the AMVapp you can get it here.

VIDEO

AUDIO

Theory Guides:

Video Basics

Television Video, Digital Video, Framerates, Resolutions, and Aspect Ratios

Understanding Audio

What Makes Audio Sound,
Digital Audio - what it all means,
Quantisation
Normalisation
What a waveform actually shows you.

The Big Picture

Interlaced vs. Progressive, Fields vs. Frames, 3:2 pulldown and Inverse Telecine

Colorspace

YUV and RGB and why they are very important to you.

The Ins and Outs of Audio Compression.

How Audio Compresses
MP3 Compression
Psychoacoustics and Masking Sounds
Bitrates and how they work
CBR and VBR
Joint Stereo

The Ins and Outs of Video Compression

What is Video Compression, Lossless Compression, Lossy Compression, Intra-frame and Inter-frame Compression

Advanced Video Compression

Editable Codecs
Distribution Codecs

 

How-to's:

Getting your Video

How to get your source footage into something you can edit.

Options for Video Sources

- Capturing Footage

- Ripping DVD Footage and

- Making Clips or
- Editing VOBs Directly in Premiere or
- Fast Editing with Perfect Quality

Getting your Audio

Introduction

How to get perfect audio copies from -

CDs

DVDs

Downloaded Audio

Video Files

Footage Preparation & AVIsynth

AVIsynth

- Making Avisynth files
- Importing DVD2AVI Project files
- Important new mpeg2dec options

Inverse Telecine - The best way to remove interlacing before editing.

Dealing With Anamorphic Sources

Preparing footage for 24fps Editing in Premiere


Advanced AVISynth Scripting

- Useful framerate scripts

Editing and Preparing your audio

Editing your music so it's shorter

Making your music louder

- Normalising
- Boosting

Converting Sample rates

Setting up an Adobe Premiere Project

 

Using your audio to help you make your video

Principles and Theory of AMV Timing

Premiere Audio Editing

Basic Timing
Advanced Timing
Stereo Positioning and Audio Effects

Exporting Your AMV Ready For Compression

Prepping your Video for Compression:

What you need to do

Deinterlacing or IVTC (if you haven't already)

Improving visual quality
and compressibility

- How to use VirtualdubAVS
- Spatial smoothing
- Temporal smoothing
- Sharpening Filters
- Colour Correction
- Exotic Filters

Resizing

 

Compressing your Video

What to do

Divx3.11a SBC (using Nandub) - old

DivX compatible codec XviD (using Virtualdub)

MPEG 1 and 2 (using TMPGenc)

Compressing and Adding your Audio for Distribution.

DivX - mp3 audio (with Virtualdub or Nandub)

MPEG - MP2 or MP3 audio (with TMPG and TooLAME)

Advanced Audio Methods