HD Workflow with Home Movies – Is It Really Worth It?

Have camcorder. To the soccer game I go. I shoot some HD movies on the camcorder and look around… I’m the only one doing this. I go to the baseball game. Same thing. Where are all the parents shooting video? Has everyone given up?

I’ve been asking around, and it seems that more and more people I know have given up on shooting video. It’s not because their kids stopped acting cute at age 2. It’s because it’s gotten more and more complicated to do anything with that video.

Last week, I spent some time fellow parent and video enthusiast, Dan Krueger, shooting the breeze about the good, bad and ugly of home movies in HD. He provided me with this awesome sample shot on his HD camcorder.

The Good

HD video is really easy to bring into the computer for editing. It may take awhile to capture it to the computer, but it’s simply a matter of moving files around.

Back when the video was in standard definition, you had some issues. Let’s say you shot your two week European vacation on miniDV tape. You got home and are all excited to show off some scenes from the trip. No time to edit a whole movie. Let’s just hook up the camcorder to the TV and watch some video.

So, you rewound the tape back to the beginning of the vacation footage. Sure, there were lots of scenes where you filmed the sidewalk. That’s ok. After awhile the sidewalk footage got boring, so you shut off the camcorder.

Did you remember to fast forward the tape to the end of the vacation footage? Most people forget this crucial step. Then, the next time they go out, they tape right over their vacation!

HD video looks great when you hook it up with an HDMI cable to the HDTV. How’s that for a lot of acronyms? And this time you’re not in any danger of writing over the files, they are all unique files.

Then there was the whole camera issue. If your camera died, you didn’t really have a way to play back the footage at all. Think about all those people with Digital8 footage. Hope you held on to your camera. There’s a booming ebay market for used Digital8 camcorders because those cameras are no longer manufactured and people have no way of playing back their tapes.

With your HD video footage already in digital format, it “should” be pretty straightforward to transcode it in the future to whatever is the latest and greatest.

The Bad

Your camera saves each movie clip as a discrete file. So, every time you turn on and off the camera you get a uniquely numbered file. Hmmm, one little league game equals 30 anonymously numbered files. Great.

With SD footage, your tape was your backup and your filing system. You labeled the tape, stuck it in a safe, and you were all set. Sure it deteriorated, but it was a physical thing that you always had. With video footage on your hard drive, you have to keep copies on multiple hard drives, and find some way of organizing those numbered files.

And how do you watch it in HD? You can’t just keep connecting your camera to your TV every time. Especially if you have a hard drive camera. You need to download the footage eventually so that you have room for more.

I found this great tutorial on how to use your XBox to stream home movies from a PC. On a Mac, I still love my AppleTV for watching home movies in HD. Both XBox and AppleTV work for PCs and Macs.

Streaming is much preferable to putting HD footage on a DVD. It looks way better than standard def footage on a DVD, but doesn’t look nearly as crisp as steaming. Much of this depends on your software. Using pro software, I can get HD footage to look awesome on a DVD. Consumer software doesn’t have as many options, however. And good luck if you’d like to burn Blu-Ray. It’s possible, but not simple by any means.

The other bad, which is completely subjective, is the actual look of HD footage. I like a little depth of field. I like my subject to be in focus and other parts of the scene to be slightly blurry. Check out Dan’s awesome softball photo. You can tell the cutie in the center is the subject. If that whole scene was in focus, you wouldn’t know where to look.With consumer HD camcorder footage, you can’t set the depth of field, so the entire scene would be super crisp. It’s a little hard on the eyes. Standard def video kept everything in focus as well, but because the whole scene was less crisp, it wasn’t as noticeable.

The Ugly

So, you invested in an HD camcorder or you use the HD video function on your point and shoot camera. What does your new workflow involve? RAM, lots and lots of RAM.

If you want to cut out those sidewalk scenes on your Mac, you will the spinning beach ball of death (or SBBOD, as many people un-affectionately call it), while your computer thinks about playing back your HD footage. If you have a MacPro, you’re probably fine. One year old base MacBook, might not be too happy.

On a PC? Dan, tells me you get a spinning circle when your RAM falls short (Mr. Gates just couldn’t resist stealing that one as well).

Dan shoots on a Canon Vixia HG21. With a 120GB hard drive, it can hold about 11 hours of HD footage. That’s a lot of vacations, ball games, birthday parties, etc.

Well, he spent hours and hours editing that 3 minute piece on his HP Pavilion desktop with 4GB RAM and upgraded video card. He did a fantastic job and I’m sure his kids will appreciate it in the years to come. But that’s a lot of time editing on the computer, and many people just aren’t willing to do it.

The Upshot?

After a while you get sick of your computer screaming as you try to edit your home movie. You begin to weigh your options. Does the extra clarity of HD really seem all that worth it? Well, a lot of people have decided no – it’s just not worth it to them. Their unedited movies are boring. They don’t feel like investing in a new computer every year. The SD footage involved tapes, which they don’t feel like playing with. And thus, many people seem to have simply given up.

What workflows seem to work in your life? Have you sent your video footage to a company to be transformed into a treasured keepsake? Are you the soccer Dad with camcorder? Does your family ever get to view the movies? Or will your kids be like me in a few years? All grown up with no home movies from their youth.