Well, this is where things get really exciting, because the viewing choices for your family history or genealogy video are almost limitless. And if you want to appeal to the younger generation, you may need to think a little more creatively than the old standby - the DVD.
Now if you are going to play in the new digital media world, you will want to understand just a few little things about video formats. Because depending on where you decide to play your family history video - an iPad or Facebook maybe - you might have to make some choices and trade-offs.
A word on formats
Last week our suburb held a community garage sale. One of the items on offer was a pair of video glasses - put them on, plug in a video cable, and enjoy the show just an inch from your eyeballs!
OK. They were a little kooky and I'm pretty sure they're not the wave of the future.But our modern world does give us an array of viewing options, many of which are fun and practical. The good news is that every one of the new viewing options can be dialed up by a simple change of format.
Most varieties of display (gadget, web hosting site, whatever) are pretty forgiving. If you have a video file on your computer, it will often upload or play on a device if you simply connect to the site or plug the player into the computer and drag it across. And if that's your situation, stop reading now.
But some sites and some devices can be particular. For example, I once encountered problems uploading videos to two different web hosting services when I used uncompressed audio in the "PCM" format. Who knew? It was just the audio format that my editing program had on the top of its list.
And my new cell phone can play video, but I don't have a lot of storage space. So I like to downsize my videos first.
Changing the attributes of your video
So, you may need to alter an attribute of your video format to make it play or to ensure you don't hog more space on the device than you need to. What then are some of the video format features that you can change?
Your family history video, any video really, has 5 main attributes:
1. Size (in pixels) - standard definition TV is 720 x 480 pixels, full HD is 1920 x 1080, normal YouTube is 640 x 360. Any video can be shrunk to fit a small screen - and you will save storage space by doing so. Video can also be expanded, but the quality will always suffer.
A lot of mobile devices boast that they can play HD video. Think carefully if you really need an HD picture size (and an HD file size) on a very small screen. (The position may be different if you want to use the device as a player for an HD TV.)
2. Frame rate - i.e. the number of frames flashed on a display screen per second. It's usually 30 for standard definition video; 60 for HD; and 24 frames per second for cinema.
You can reduce video frame rates to 20 or 15 fps if you want to keep the video file small - but the movie may look a little jumpy. Where file size is critical, you can make a big reduction by reducing your video frame rate.
3. Data or Bit Rate: If frame size is like the diameter of a pipe, data or bit rate is the speed of the flow. A standard DVD pushes pictures onto the screen at an average of around 7Mbps (megabits per second); a YouTube video may use 2 or 3Mbps; HD video may be 25Mbps.
You can adjust your video's bit rate settings to reduce the video file size, or if the device demands it (e.g. the Apple iPhone has a 2.5 Mbps limit for video).
4. Audio format: Just as video has a bit rate, so does audio. But compared to video, audio bit rates are tiny. Good quality audio for a web video is 320 Kbps (around one-thousandth of the video bit rate). Nothing to worry about, in my opinion.
Common formats for compressed audio (it's usually compressed, unless you are playing a CD) are MP3 and AAC. Uncompressed audio formats like AIFF, WAV, and PCM may get you into trouble if you try to upload the video to the web or if you try to load the video onto a portable device.
5. Video formats: You can tell the current format of a video (any file really) by its suffix. ".mov" means it's a QuickTime file; ".MP4" means it's a, well, MPEG4 file; ".wav" means it's a Windows media file; and so on. What underlies each of these formats is a style of video compression (or "codec"). Common codecs are H264 (Apple preferred) and WMV9 (Windows preferred).
You should check your device to see what video file flavor it likes, but I haven't gone wrong so far with QuickTime H264.
Try to work from the original video timeline
By and large, you can switch from one video format to another and change any attributes you want - if and when needed.
But when changing any attribute of video, it is always best to make the change from the original editing timeline. Changing from one compressed format to another often involves some loss of quality and the creation of "artifacts" - small processing errors which tarnish the look of the video.
Not only but also...
Does this cover the basics?
There are a bunch of other settings to noodle over - like single-pass or multi-pass encoding; 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios; interlaced or progressive scanning; 44.1kHz or 48kHz audio sampling, compression key framing, and so on. But that's another Saturday and another blog.
Whew! Now, with that all over, next time we can look at some interesting places to showcase that family history video.
Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Family History Video, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.
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