Create a short demo video. The point is to experiment with video composition and non-linear (i.e. digital) editing. The input video data you use can be live, synthetic, or from other sources.
At some point during the term, you must accomplish a "background assignment" that requires the creation of video or multimedia content. For this assignment, you must work in groups of 3 students. Three (3) teams will have priority on the SOCS graphics facilities each week.
The suggested approach is to create a demo video of either:
At the beginning of term, you must select a week in which you will do your project, and a set of partners. Students who cannot find a partner will have one assigned. You must sign up on the web-based reservation form by the end of January. The best way is to use the on-line web-based form. You can also do it by sending an email message to cs557 with the subject RESERVATION (just that one word, all in capitals), and 4 lines in it:
Your submission for the background project should be an NTSC-format video on VHS tape, and should be of roughly 2 to 8 minutes duration. Submissions using live video should, genenerally, be longer than those based on synthetic images. The final submission should include a text document that specifies the precise contribution of each team member, broken down into 100 "contribution points". A simple example follows:
Greg video editing with premiere
assignment of trasitions 10
testing draft versions 15
Bob digitizing and cutting footage 15
planning sequence 25
Carol generating synthetic footage with POVRAY 35
Team that do their assignment earlier in the term will benefit from a slightly more generous marking policy.
The following criteria will be used in evaluating your submission, roughly in order of importance:
For example, a video which is a collection of random clips haphazardy stuck together will be graded poorly. Using every possible transition effect that Premiere offers is generally not a good idea; it's equivalent to the kind of document people produce on their first computer, filled with different fonts as if it were a ransom letter.
You may want to use FTP to transfer files between the Macs used for video production and your UNIX account, or other machines. The SOCS system staff is supposed to enable us to directly mount UNIX directories at some point.
The Macs have video and audio input and output ports on the back of the main box. Use can used Adobe Premiere to capture video, as well as to edit it.
You can purchase your own ZIP disk for about $20 at the computer store, which can be used to store video data (capacity about 100M).