Video Editing Considerations

Music

When using music, you need to ensure it is available under an adequate license. If you do not have explicit permission, you are not allowed to use the content!

Nice places to find freely-licensed music are:

• DanoSongs
• Josh Woodward
• Free Music Archive (check each song's license!)
• digCCmixter (check each song's license!)

Stock Photos and Video

When using stock footage, you need to ensure it is available under an adequate license. If you do not have explicit permission, you are not allowed to use the content!

Nice places to get freely-licensed stock footage are:

• Pexels (no attribution required)
• Pixabay (no attribution required)
• Flickr (check each item's license!)
• Unsplash (only pictures, no attribution required)

Creative Commons Licenses 

The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are very common for music, photos, and video content. They have different requirements; the easiest ones to use are CC0 (no requirements) and CC-BY (attribution required, as explained later). Content with those licenses is very easy to use.

Other CC licenses, such as those containing SA ("share alike", must share under same license), ND ("no derivatives", cannot modify the content), NC ("non-commercial", cannot use content commercially), are more difficult to fulfill and you should generally avoid them.

Some places use their own, custom license instead of CC. Read it before using their content.

To properly give attribution, as required by the CC-BY license, you need to communicate what content was made by whom and how it is licensed. More information on good attribution practices is available on CC's best practices for attribution page.

In a video, the easiest form of attribution is to display text at the end of the video. For example if you use the music "Trouble With Tribals", you can give attribution with "Music used is 'Trouble With Tribals' by Kevin MacLeod from incompetech.filmmusic.io, licensed under CC-BY 4.0." If you use this clip from Pexels, you do not need to give any attribution. But you if you're nice, you could write, for example, "Used 'A Person Crumbling A Note In Frustration And Throwing It Towards The Laptop' by Karolina Grabowska from pexels.com, under Pexel's license."

You do not need to have this text on its own at the end. Sometimes you can overlay it over top of your video. In general though, such an attribution is distracting from the video, so prefer to put it at the end.

Branding

RWTH, i10 Branding resources location.

Logos for the RWTH and i10 are available on Oliver at /Public Relations/Logo.

Fonts for the RWTH ("Helvetica Neue") and i10 ("Eurostyle", "Agency") are available on Oliver at /Public Relations/Fonts.

File Organization

Most video files are stored on oliver under Videos, except for those related to papers which go in the paper's folder. Lecture videos should be stored under the appropriate folder in Videos/Lectures. Other videos should be put into a folder whose name start with a timestamp followed by a description, e.g., 2019-12-02 - Workshop AC2.

Since the recordings and editing files tend to need a lot of space, we separate them from the resulting videos. This way, when storage space runs low, we can easily delete the editing files without the risk of losing the final videos. For this reason there is a Videos/_Edit folder. The folder name here should mirror where the final videos are in Videos to make it easy to find the editing files for any final video.

There are two special folders in Videos/_Edit: _Footage is used to store the recordings on oliver which are then imported into the editing software. Again, the folder structure mirrors the final structure in Videos to make it easier to find the recordings for any final video. _Renders is used for temporary output that for example is then compressed in Handbrake.

Videos/_Backup contains backups of various devices where content has accrued. Whenever you need to clear for example an SD card but don't know whether all files on it have been backed up already, you can store it here. The files are organized by device and by the date they were backed up here. So _Backup/Zoom/2020-01-27 contains files from the Zoom audio recorder that were backed up on January 27th 2020.

Workflow

For a lecture, I recommend the following workflow. As an example for this workflow, you can look at the "10 Years Maker Meeting (RWTH Intro)" project in the Final Cut Pro library on oliver at Videos/_Edit/2019-07-17 - 10 Years Maker Meeting.

If you have a speaker video and a slide recording, I recommend to first synchronize them in a timeline without cutting them up. (In the Maker Meeting example this is the "Audio" timeline.)

Then do all the changes where you need to modify one of the synchronized things, e.g., activating the audience's audio for a question or showing the slide instead of the speaker. Doing this before cutting keeps the correct timecodes, which can be helpful if you take notes during recording. I recommend noting the timestamp of every audience question during recording, so that you can easily adjust the audio for all questions without needing to rewatch everything.

As a guideline, try to show the speaker as much as possible and only cut to the slides when they talk about what's written on there. When in doubt, trust your gut feeling.

Put this synchronized and modified timeline into another timeline. This allows you to cut it up without messing up the synchronization. (In the Maker Meeting example this is the "Cut" timeline.)

Put this cut timeline into another timeline for mastering. (In the Maker Meeting example this is the "10 Years Maker Meeting (RWTH Intro)" timeline.) In Final Cut Pro you can assign different roles to the audio in the synchronized timelines, which are accessible in the master timeline by choosing "Expand Audio Components" after right-clicking on the item in the master timeline. If you assign the speaker's audio and the audience's audio different roles, this allows you to master them globally without copying effects to each cut up clip and makes it possible to correct your effects. By clicking on each audio component you can apply audio enhancements like "Loudness" or "Noise Removal" to each of them separately.

Don't forget to put in the RWTH intro and outro, available on oliver at Videos/Intro and Outro. Simply put them at the beginning and the end, and add a crossfade. Ensure that they fill the entire screen by setting their scale to 102 %; currently, the raw clips have a black border.

For one-off videos you typically do not have as many recordings to synchronize, so the workflow is much more natural.

Always choose the workflow that works best for you. If something looks too complicated, try a simpler workflow. If you notice that you encounter issues, read these recommendations again; maybe they will make more sense then.

Compression

The videos exported from the video editing software are typically quite large. You can compress quite effectively with Handbrake. Simply load the video file you want to compress into Handbrake, and export it from there.

The most important setting is under the "Video" tab and called "Constant Quality". Note that a higher number means a lower quality! For screencasts where most of the time the image does not move, you can use high setting like 30. For other videos, you easily go to something between 25 and 30. When in doubt, try it out.

Another interesting setting is in the "Overview" tab and called "Web optimized." Enabling this makes it so you don't need to donwload the entire file to start playing it. Files in such a streamable format are processed faster by, e.g., YouTube.

You can download the preset file Handbrake-Screencast-Preset.zip, unzip it, and import it into Handbrake. It sets the quality to 30 which works well for screencasts. It also disables a few "smart" options that sometimes do the wrong thing: It disables "Dimensions/Anamorphic", automatic cropping ("Dimensions/Cropping"), and everthing under "Filter". Sometimes Handbrake tried to crop parts of the video that were black in the beginning but later used. Therefore we disabled all these options.