Many users of the first generation of PC’s will remember the excitement of acquiring, at not inconsiderable expense, their first set of new bitmapped fonts, which came in only a few fixed point sizes, and watching proudly as they printed out on a noisy matrix printer, giving a whole new style to the printed page.

Font collectors later became clipart collectors, as many of the early painting applications bundled a miscellaneous assortment of black and white bitmapped clipart images on an extra diskette included with the software. With the advent of drawing applications, vector clipart started to appear, with quality improving rapidly as the market developed. Then, as CD technology arrived on the desktop, whole CD libraries of high quality, royalty-free images became available to the user.

Already, the same trend is being followed in the domain of desktop video, as many video editing applications are now bundling short video clips on CD ROM with their software and the first commercial video clip libraries are beginning to appear.

Subject to normal copyright considerations, the sources of material for use in the production of desktop video, including multimedia projects, can be summarised as follows:

  Composite VHSC or Hi8 analogue video/audio clips captured from a VCR or a camcorder or from terrestrial, cable or satellite TV

  Video/audio clips captured from a digital camcorder via a Firewire adapter card

  Animation or morphing video clips and audio sound effect clips supplied with video hardware or application software

  Video and audio clips sold like clipart by commercial suppliers, e.g. Corel’s Gallery

  Animated GIF video files (e.g. Corel Gallery Webart) for use in projects designed for the Internet

  Still digital camera images which can be downloaded from the camera and incorporated within multimedia projects

  Other still images such as scans, vector or bitmap clipart and 3D modelled objects. These can be used as still images or incorporated in animations via applications like Bryce 3D

  Stills can include business charts like graphs, histograms, pie charts, bar charts, etc. for inclusion in business multimedia presentations

  Adobe Type 1 and Truetype typefaces can be used for creating titles and text overlays on video or stills

  Colour washes, textures and fractal images for use as backgrounds or overlays

  Analogue sound captured from a stereo system via the PC’s audio digitising card and suitable recording software

  Speech captured via a microphone, digitising card and recording software

  Musical sound clips in MID or WAV format either bundled with audio hardware or software or purchased from a clip library

  Digital music captured from music CD ROMs

  Digital video and audio clips capture from Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)

  Audio clips downloaded from Internet sources

Having acquired raw material from sources such as those described above, the challenge facing the user is how to organize it all in a way which does not involve rummaging through countless videotapes, diskettes and CD-ROMs to find that clip showing a sailing boat disappearing into the sunset that would provide the perfect ending to the project due to be delivered to the customer tomorrow! Fortunately, a number of applications are available which help to address this problem.

Where hard disk storage space considerations rule out the digitisation and storage of many hours of raw videotape material, Studio 200 provides a simple and space-saving means of cataloguing video clips. As mentioned earlier in Chapter 3, Studio 200 can detect each of the different scenes shot on camcorder tapes and then automatically log the start and end tape positions for successive scenes, capturing an image of a frame at the beginning of each scene. Figure 7.1 shows thumbnail images of a series of clips logged in a Tape Library in this way. When a library is reopened, double-clicking on a thumbnail opens the Modify Clip window (Figure 7.2) which displays the clip duration and Start and End positions on the tape. With this information, a selected clip can then be digitised and imported into a videoediting application. As well as providing a thumbnail image to help indicate the contents of each clip in a library, Studio 200 provides the means of recording archival information to describe and categorise the contents of each clip. This information, which is entered via the aptly named Clip Information window (Figure 7.3), can be retrieved by clicking on the Info button in the Tape Library window.

Studio 200 also provides a library search function which can be used to search through clip names, comments and categories to find specific text. The text string to be searched for – e.g. Gulf coast or Travel – is first entered into the Search Text window in the Library Search dialog box (Figure 7.4) and then the search is initiated to cover the entire tape library, or just the current library list. All clips matching the search text are identified and listed by tape and clip name. Clips on the list can then be modified, deleted, or added to the event list as they can be in any tape library mode.

Video clips which have already been digitised and saved to disk can be logged using the cataloguing facilities provided with a videoediting application. Lumiere's Media Catalog, for example (Figure 7.5), normally just provides a registry of the clips used in a particular Lumiere project, but a Media Catalog file can be named, saved and opened independently of the original project and other files can be added to or deleted from the catalogue as required, using the Import and Delete tools included in the toolbar at the top of the Media Catalog window. It is important to note that the catalogue file remains relatively small as it points only to the location of the clips, rather than maintaining copies of them. As well as logging video clips, a Media Catalog file can include pointers to sound files and still image files.

MediaStudio's Clip Library can also log video and other file formats. In Thumbnail mode (Figure 7.6a), only the clip thumbnail and clip name shows. In Expanded mode (Figure 7.6b), the window shows a thumbnail of each clip along with detailed information including mark in, mark out, and file information. The button in the top right corner of the window gives access to facilities for annotating files contained within a library and for carrying out searches for clips with information matching the search criteria.

Premier’s Project window (Figure 7.7) is used to stockpile clips for importing into a project. For each clip, the default Project window displays the name, a thumbnail, the general type (Movie, Audio, Still Image, Filmstrip, Background Matte, or Title), the duration, a Comment box and two Label boxes. The Comment box and two Label boxes to the right of the clip name are used to attach notes to a clip. Adding a comment or a label simply involves clicking the appropriate box and typing the text to be associated with the clip. Clips can be alphabetized according to comments or labels. While providing the above functions, Premiere’s Project window is designed for use with its associated project rather than to provide a more general library function.

As an alternative to using the logging facilities provided within a videoediting application, clips can be logged in an independent library application designed for the purpose. Corel GALLERY Magic, for example, is a multimedia file manager designed to organise files into albums for the purpose of editing, performing batch operations and creating slide shows. The desktop (Figure 7.8) contains four windows. The Drive Directory window is in the lower left, the Drive window is in the lower right, the Album Directory window is in the top left, and the Album window is in the top right. Multiple album windows can be open on the desktop at the same time.

In the Drive and Drive Directory windows, drives, folders and files are represented by icons. In the Album Directory window, open book icons represent expanded albums, and closed book icons represent collapsed albums. In the Album window, thumbnails represent graphic files, and icons represent non-graphic files such as video or audio clips (Note: In order to provide an image thumbnail for video clips, the first frame from each clip can be captured and saved as an image file in any video capture application and displayed in the album alongside the video file). New files are added to an album simply by dragging their icons from the Drive window into the Album window.

The application supports a wide range of vector, bitmap, video and audio formats and provides filters for converting between formats. Many features are included for creating, accessing and working with albums, clipart, photos, video files, and audio files. A Properties button gives quick access to information about the contents of an album, by filename or keywords (Figure 7.9). A Browser Database provides the facilities to enter each album file into a database where it is assigned a library name, filename, title, caption, and several unique keywords. A powerful search feature (Figure 7.10) can then be used to perform sophisticated searches, using this information, to locate any item in the database.

After selecting an album, clicking on a Slide Show button gives access to a full screen display of the image files contained within the library. The show can either be run using a preset delay between images, as they are displayed sequentially in the order in which they appear in the library, or controlled by clicking with the mouse.

Summary

As desktop video hardware and software increase in power and the market continues to grow, we can expect to see a rapid increase in the availability of audio and video clip libraries offering material for purchase or license. Such material can be integrated ‘as is’ with new, original footage, or edited to adapt it to meet the specific requirements of a new project. The increasing use of videoconferencing on the Web is likely also to act as a stimulus to desktop video as technology is developed to manipulate video within the Internet environment. Subject to the restrictions of copyright, such developments could fuel an exponential increase in the amount of material which becomes available to the user.

The desktop video editor has the same need as a writer or desktop publisher to establish a reliable filing and retrieval system – perhaps even more need, considering the range of raw materials from audio clips to still images, animations and captured video which may be required for composition of new projects. Already, as this chapter has shown, simple solutions are available for this purpose. No doubt, faster and more sophisticated search engines are already in the pipeline to help cope with the increased raw material which is becoming available.