Making a DVD out of old family movies

So you have a box of old family movies and want to make them available to your family?

Let's assume these are precious to you. Not that they are really super photography, but they're YOUR family. There is nothing cheap about making the best movies (except possibly the subjects!). Think about it. What would you give to have some movies of your great-grandparents, or even your grandparents? You will be setting up for younger generations, and for yourself as well.

FILM

I had a box of old films, and here's what I did, and now my family has a DVD of the whole works – almost 3 hours of it.

Mine were on 16 mm film. There are two ways to transfer them to digital, one with only fair results is the cheaper, but for about three times as much you can get them scanned. This is done using special very expensive apparatus, so there aren't many places that can do it, but it is well worth the price.

DIGITAL

I did both. First the plain copying from 16mm analog film to digital, which was $600. After a lot of work, when I saw the results it was obvious that better would be needed, so I went ahead and had them scanned -- for $2,500.

Those old film reels were really quite short, and often the camera times were extremely short. When I got the scans back, I first played the whole thing through and made notes about the subject matter.

NOTES AND TITLES

From these notes, I then arranged the footage in some kind of interesting order. Here is where your very special skills come in. Only you, not someone you might hire, know who the people are and how they are related.

What I did was first to look through the entire scan and give titles to the various parts. My choice was to give a name to every single shot, which means every time the camera was turned on up to the moment it was turned off. In the three hours of film there were 235 shots. Some shots can be used together, such as different shots of a single event like a birthday.

EDITING

How do you get to see them? For this you need an editing program. I use Final Cut Studio Pro with Leopard system on a Mac Pro with 5GB of RAM, which also comes with DVD Studio Pro that will be needed later. Also plenty of space on the hard disc, I have four 500GB internal drives. Remember, movies take up a LOT more disc space than text -- about 1GB for each 20 minutes of movie running time.

SPREADSHEETS

After I examined the digital cassettes and named the parts, I looked at them again and made precise notes of the timecodes where each shot begins. Then I created a spreadsheet listing the shots and timecodes, as well as numbering the shots for my convenience.

Grandma's birthday

Shot Timecode Description

1 00:01;03 Beginning

2 00:01;52 Door opens

3 00:02;20 Uncle John comes in

4 00:03;50 Grandma seated

and so on. This may seem tedious and unnecessary, but believe me, later on it will prove to save time and avoid problems. Notice the timecode is mm:ss;fr for minutes, seconds, and frames.

I then also made another list, another spreadsheet, of the events, like this:

Event Description Time

Grandma's birthday at the old house 5 min

Swimming at the river 2 min

the hike around the mountain 3 min

playing with pets on the lawn 8 min

(and so on)

ARRANGING

As the clips are arranged, a kind of story began to take shape. Some were set in chronological order, some by subject. At this point I calculated the times. Setting events into categories of somewhat equal time length meant making decisions where to put which clips. This part of the process took careful thought because there are many contradictions, overlaps, uncertainties and some things that are just plain forgotten. Consulting with relatives helped some, but it also led to even more complications because people have different memories of an event.

In my work there were a total of two hours 55 minutes in all, which I divided into twelve movies, each of which has some thread of story or similarity. The longest was 28 minutes, the shortest was 7 minutes, and most of them were about 10 minutes.

From here on it gets technical.

EXPERIMENTING

Now. Did I actually do it this way? Well, no, of course not. What I did was to make a whole lot of mistakes and redundant actions that had later to be abandoned. First thing I did wrong was to get the movies copied cheaply, and then identified all 235 clips, logged and captured them separately into the editing program. Much later I discovered that taking the clips out of context meant that I then made some big mistakes in identifying the people and the action in those clips. It was better to capture an event complete, and do the editing later in the editing program.

The scanned copy was much better quality, but it also revealed defects that had otherwise been scarcely noticeable. So there had to be a clean-up process.

CLEAN-UP

Now, with let's say 30 frames per second, and I had three hours of films, that is a whole lot of frames (324,000). There were long stretches of film with either very few defects or none at all. Final Cut Pro allows you to examine every single frame separately, and decide whether or not to erase that frame. It will also permit you to scrub along frame by frame. I did this by holding down the keys K-L until it came to a defect and then lift the L, back up (J) and examine the defective frame(s). It takes patience and a lot of time. Some defects occur at a moment in the action that you don't want to miss, and I left them if they were not too awful looking.

The clean-up process took a very long time. It is also hard on the eyes, and I found that only a few hours of it can be done in a single day. So it went on, and on, and on, for months. But each time an event was completely cleaned, all I had to do was play it through, to see how wonderfully clear and bright the results were, and how well worth the trouble.

CHAPTERS

Next after clean-up was to set what are called "Chapter" markers on the Final Cut Pro timelines of the various movies. The first one in each movie is automatic -- it is the very first frame of the movie and has no title. The chapters must be more than one second apart, mine were never less than one second plus two frames, and this problem occurs mostly at the beginning, where you want your own Chapter marker with a title. Setting them is easy. You find the exact frame where you want one, then, making sure nothing is "selected" anywhere, hit the "m" key twice, which makes a marker on the top line of the timeline and pops up with a window so you can select "Add a Chapter Marker" and then name it. I also gave it a name at the top of that window -- the same as the Chapter marker name.

I put chapter markers at every point to which I wanted to call attention. Not only scene changes but sometimes various actions within a scene. At first I put in too many, and later removed some of them.

INDEX

When the Chapter markers are all set, it was time to make a spreadsheet of them, with the revised timecodes.

Nos. Timecode Description

1 00:01;02 Grandma's birthday party begins

2 00:02;20 Uncle Joe enters the room

3 00:03;10 Grandma's big smile

(and so on)

Notice the times are changed, and one clip is omitted. It has been decided we do not need a Chapter to say the door is opening. We will see it opening. And it is not Grandma sitting down but her big smile that needs notice. You get the idea. The files keep changing as it goes.

I also found it advisable to shift parts around. In chronological order it is not always easy to remember which kid is which, especially brothers and sisters, but the chances are that they will remember all very well when they see it and if you get it wrong you will hear about it later. Here is where relatives helped, when I showed them bits and places that are ambiguous in some way.

NARRATION

When everything is in order it is time, if these are silent movies, to add the voiceover -- the narration. I decided what to say, which people to identify and what background to describe. I found it also useful to create text captions for some of this.

For the voiceover the simplest is to make a recording on a digital cassette and then capture it into Final Cut Pro. Cassettes are now only about $14 each, and you can put a great deal on a single one that runs 60 minutes. I used a lavalier microphone, clipped to the lapel of my jacket.

I found it best to start the recording and wait five seconds before saying anything, and then after the end of that talk, let it play another five seconds before stopping it. Next one, again wait five seconds before speaking, and have five seconds silent before stopping the recording. And at the end of the recording session, let the recorder go on for an additional five seconds as a buffer, meaning ten seconds after the end of the last talk. Later when I logged and captured, I was glad of the time buffers because the times shown on screen do not always match the actual times in the recorder, but with buffers it worked okay.

CAPTIONS

Text images are great to announce the beginning of a scene. What I did is open up the Effects tab which appears along with the Browser, and looked for the Text Generator. A click on it will bring it into the Viewer. Then insert it somewhere on any timeline and click that back into the Viewer. This gave me a copy, not the original. In the Viewer I clicked on the Motion tab and I saw the text input window. Clear it if there is anything in it, put in my own words, and then after clicking the Video tab to see if it looks right, inserted the thing into some place in the timeline, either as a plain Insert or as an Overwrite. Remember you can always Edit/Undo if you make a mistake. And then play that part of the timeline before Saving the project. I save my project every time I get something right, but I mean really right, which may mean dozens of times in a morning.

The next time I wanted to make text, I just made a copy of one already in my timeline, erased what was in it, inserted the new text and then put it into the timeline at the new location. If you happen to have put text into the original, you only need to erase it and then, after that, do it right -- use only a copy, never the original.

INSERTS

Inserting text captions, or transitions using a single frame, will change the timecode settings, will displace the chapter markers (that do not move when the clip moves) so it was necessary to check and revise the timecode numbers in the spreadsheet, and to print the newly revised spreadsheet on paper.

INDEX FILE

For each movie I then made a copy of the spreadsheet without the timecode column, and offset to the right by inserting a blank column at the left edge. The result was then printed on paper and scanned to a .jpg file using HP Photosmart Studio. With Photoshop CS3 I trimmed the edges to eliminate details not needed for the Index of chapters, which then was imported to Final Cut and appended to the timeline of the movie. This Index added 10 seconds, and a caption lasting 15 frames saying “Index” preceded it on the timeline.

By then everything was ready for export. The Index time and timecode was added to the chapters spreadsheet, the one with timecode, and printed for reference. At this point careful checking is necessary before export.

EXPORT

Export was done “using Compressor” with the following settings. I had determined, bu the use of the “bit bucket” measuring spreadsheet, that the compression ratio could be not the default 5.0 but 6.8. When Compressor starts up (from within Final Cut) the first thing I did was to click on the Target tab on the top line,

And choose “Change setting”. Of the displayed options, I first selected the Video

And it produced a bar to match, in the window on the left. On the right, in the Inspector window, I selected the 2^nd button from the left, then chose the Quality tab in the next windows, and changed “5.0” to “6.8”.

The second setting in Compressor begins with a click on the “+” sign at the end of the movie video name bar on the left. A second name bar appears. Then a click on the Target tab in the top row produces the same options as before. This second time I chose Dolby audio, and then a second time click on the Target tab to select Destination, and then chose Desktop. Next, in the Inspector on the right, select the tab on the right end and change Film Compression to “None”.

Finally, clicked on “Submit” and then was careful not to touch anything during the lengthy process of Frame counts (twice) and finally Audio, all of them in progress report windows. When it is finished it simply stops without any announcement. Got out of Compressor, then saved Final Cut (even though there has been no change since the last save).

DVD CONSTRUCTION

Now for the DVD. Opened DVD Studio Pro. First I chose a template from the large number of them shown in the window on the right. My choice was one way down the line, showing the inside of a theater with an audience. For this one, I had a picture, a .jpg, to show when the curtains part. I also had a background color, a solid color, for all the menus, another .jpg file. These two files are the first Assets to import, using the leftmost tab in the top bar, “Import Assset”.

The Assete tab shows in its window the names of the assets that have been imported, as well as the name of the template that has been chosen.

Imported a movie – first its video, then its audio. Next I clicked on the top row button to Add a track, and then dragged the video to the upper level of the timeline of the track, and then dragged the audio to the lower level.

Next I clicked on to top row button to Add a menu, then set the Graphics to where I could easily see it. Clicked on the new Menu icon, which brings that Menu into the center window. At that point I dragged the background asset onto the Menu window.

Clicked on the Track icon, and in the Inspector (on the right) opened the End Jump window and selected Menu, then Menu, then Menu. It’s easy to forget to do this, and the movie will just end in a silent blank.

MENU

On the Menu the design is drawn. I used a cascade of menus for the twelve short movies.

First is the choice of movies. First I set the dimensions by clicking and spreading the corner points. Next I chose to use buttons with the Apple shape Round Somehing Border, and set Text to Center and checked Include. The name of the movie went into the Text box. Ended up with twelve of these boxes on that menu, and one more box for “Main” or “back up”, pointing at Menu>Menu. The movie name buttons got set after those movies had been imported and placed.

STORY

I used Stories a lot. A Story, in this specialized meaning of the word, is a list of playing commands. In function, a Story is similar to batch (.bat) files on DOS or shell scripts on UNIX, in that it executes what is listed in it. The Story is a very flexible tool and will do just about anything you want.

Construction design from here on depends on the film itself. On the longer ones I set only two options.

1) Play the entire (individual) movie.

2) Play any of several groups of scenes in that movie.

For the smaller ones I set a third option:

3) Choose individual scenes.

In each choice I used a Story. To make a story, I clicked the Track where it was to be used, then clicked on the top tab Add a Story, which created a blank Story icon in the Graphics window. The first thing to set in a Story is the End Jump, in which goes the name of the Menu that calls the Story. Then I clicked again on the Story icon, and a window with all the Chapter names in that track appear. From the list on the left half of the Story window I dragged what I want to the right side, remembering that the order can be changed by dragging them, and any of them can be deleted later.

NAVIGATION

Also, on each Menu page I put three extra navigation buttons:

1) Index

2) back up

3) Main

For each Index button there needs to be a special Story with its End Jump pointing back to that Menu and only the Index chapter dragged into it.

The “back up” button had to point back to the previous Menu, and the “Main” button pointed to the Menu 1 > Menu in all cases.

BUILD AND BURN

When it seems perfect, I clicked the icon Build and Burn icon. While the window for that is up, I opened the disc burn drive and put in a blank disc.

For the dual layer discs, I had to remember to click the second tab and reset the size from Single to Dual layer. This had to be done for every disc.

DVDSP will tell you the (approximate) size of your project, but if you forget to set the Dual Layer it will spoil a single-layer disc and refuse to finish. So there.

I found it is good to plan to have some extra discs because mistakes do happen.

SUMMARY

This is really simple stuff but there is so much detail it gets difficult. And as I made changes it became hard to remember to check everything. But if there was one thing I really learned it is that checking, no matter how much time it takes, is really easier, and a lot less embarrassing, than making and shipping a new set of discs. Sometimes it’s easier, I found, to make one disc and check that, but DVDSP permits complete checking using the Simulate icon over the central window.

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