Starting with Ductwars, the technology use has increase ten-fold. Here are some of the tools of our trade that you may find you need. Technology
DC-10 Video Capture Board: This is a good little analog->digital converter that sits in your PCI slot. It can capture fairly well with minimal dropped frames. Effects like saturation, brightness, tint, contrast, and sharpness can all be done on the fly as you capture the video. The only downsides are that the video is compressed and looses quality with each edit. If you have a large file, it can skip when sending back out to a VCR. But all in all, when dealing with a standard 8mm camcorder, this is the thing to get. Retail price is usually about $99.
Studio DV - Digital Video Capture Board: For $75 you can throw this in your computer and transfer your digital video through a firewire cable into you computer. But you need a 7200rpm HD and DMA mode enabled, or you will go many a sleepless night wondering why it won't capture without dropping half the frames. The editing software isn't half bad. No effects but the transistions are nice and you can piece together stuff and add music etc.
Sony 8mm Camera: We're still living in the analog world and 8mm tape will have to do. We plan to get a Mini-DV in the future, but until then let's take a look at this $500 wonder. The most convienent feature is the pull-out screen which enables us to see exactly what we're filming. It came with a paper thin remote (after driving 40 miles and complaining to circuit city that they forgot to give it to us) so we no longer need a person to hit the record button for us; good for our 3 person movies, or people constantly laugh in the background when filming. There are some effects but they aren't used much since we have the video capture board. But these are: mosaic, negative, letterbox, mirror, and digital zoom. Fades include: fade to black, fade to b/w, and fade to black and zoom. Some downsides to this camera are lack of external microphone support, and it fuzzes sometimes.
Canon GL-1: Finally a mini-DV camera to call our own. Retailing for $2,400, you can get it for $2,299 at amazon.com. The quality is crazy too. 720x480 with minimal compression. The only problem is that the frame size is too big to be supported by most codec, including the miroDV one that came with the board! Luckily, if you export it uncompressed, or poke around and find a codec that supports frames over 640x480, then the Studio DV software will pull it back into the DV format.
Adobe Premier 4.2: All video editing and splicing must pass through this program. You can re-arrange scenes, add effects, speed/slow down film, set transparency (blue screens), and add transitions between scenes. Without this we would have had to use the default DC-10 editor which was barfy. Version 5.5 is not a quality product.
Adobe Photoshop & Eyecandy: All frame by frame stuff was done in this program. Most importantly the lightsaber scenes, where a glow (or other) effect had to be applied by hand to each frame (7798 in DWI, 8300+ in DWII).
Adobe After Effects: Supposedly you can do cool stuff. I'll need to work with it more.
Newtek Lightwave: All 3d work was done in this. Both full scene 3d and added characters. This was the most painful work because I'm no good at 3d modeling/animation.
Soundforge: Sound effects are key. All dubbing needed to be recorded through this. And some voices need to be altered because they couldn't stop laughing through the scene.
Broomhandles: Yes, never underestimate how good a broom handle makes for a lightsaber. Except when it shatters into two (or three) pieces.
Ducttape: ¿Need I say more?
