DIY Video: 10 User-Generated Content Tools You Can't Live Without

Use Kino, iMovie, or Windows Movie maker if your budget is tight. Move up to Final Cut, Avid, or Premiere when you can afford it. Motion is really cool, but you may need to buy Final Cut Studio to get it if you can’t obtain a copy on its own. Shake for Mac OS is now available at a much reduced price, which sends signals that a replacement might be under development. Adobe After Effects is well-known and available on Mac OS and Windows. Linux has open source alternatives such as Jahshaka.

Audio
A movie is nothing without a soundtrack, and people will tolerate bad video with good sound far more than vice versa. At the least you need tools that can change the sample rate of the audio from 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz and back again. These are the two sample rates you will encounter most often. Your NLE software may do this for you, but for some content you may justify a studio-quality solution. If the audio needs restoration, then you need to use some noise removal software and apply some equalization. Even if you are ultimately just going to produce an MP3, you can pre-emphasize certain frequencies so it sounds sweeter after it has been encoded.

If you are working just with audio files or ingesting the audio separately from an analog source then follow these steps:

1. Digitize the analog audio from your vinyl or tape player through a good quality FireWire or USB interface.
2. Normalize the recording to the peak level so it uses the full dynamic range.
3. Remove the hiss, hum, rumble, and other noise. I use BIAS SoundSoap for this.
4. Split into individual tracks. This is similar to splitting video files. For this I use Roxio’s CD Spin Doctor, which is supplied with Toast. On the Windows side, Roxio Sound Editor will get the job done.
5. For long-term storage, I compress using Apple Lossless Compression to save space.
6. For deployment onto the media server, use iTunes to convert the tracks to AAC or MP3.
Compression
You need compression tools to prepare your content for delivery. The more money you can spend on these tools, the better they will compress your footage. Cheap and free tools do an adequate job, but tools priced for a few hundred dollars will save more bit rate or deliver higher quality for the same throughout.

If you want to produce Windows Media, the Episode Pro encoding software from Telestream will do Flash and Windows Media. If you need to create H.264 video, then Episode supports that codec as well. For the few hundred dollars it costs, you get a lot of encoding versatility.

Delivery
Amazingly, even the streaming server software is available at budget prices. This means you can deliver workable solutions for streaming media on just about any level of funding you have available. (You can also deliver some formats via HTTP, but we’ll stick with streaming here.)

The Red5 Flash Media server with some good software for creating Flash Video (FLV) movies is all you need to reconstruct your own YouTube-like service. Clearly, the difference between your freeware and low-cost server solution and YouTube is the necessary infrastructure to manage millions of clips and serve to many simultaneous users worldwide. Nevertheless, you can get started for almost no outlay at all. Red5 is free. Basic FLV encoders are also not hugely expensive.

Metadata
Managing the metadata and extracting it so you can feed your content management system is a nontrivial task. The best way to extract metadata is to open a movie in QuickTime and request the metadata through the QuickTime API. This is not for the faint of heart, though, because it is a technical challenge.

You have four ways to attack this—at least on Mac OS.1. First, open the file in QuickTime movie player. Then inspect the assets using the Browse panels.
2. Alternatively, you could access the player with AppleScript or Automator on a Macintosh system. There are more than 70 metadata properties available.
3. The third and possibly most versatile is to use the QT_Tools command line utilities within a UNIX shell script—this is an alternative to AppleScript and may be easier to integrate into a workflow.
4. Finally, you can write code to access the movie directly through the QuickTime Software Developer Kit’s API. That is the most challenging of all, but you can access and modify anything in the movie container.

On Windows, you can still access the QuickTime API or manually inspect the movie with the player application. This is an area that is evolving rapidly and some of the newer projects are open source. One in particular is called Hachoir and runs in Python. Theoretically at least, that means it is a portable solution.

Content Management
Ultimately, everything else you do will be for naught if you can't keep a handle on your content library. Whether you are working on video as a hobby, professionally in small business, or on a large scale in an enterprise, you will soon find that managing collections of video clips becomes unwieldy, and much more quickly than you might initially imagine. A few hundred tracks are easy to organize into folders. A few thousand are more difficult. the number of clips grows into the tens of thousands, it gets out of control.

Maintaining a database that automatically collects the metadata together and lets you find assets quickly is a must-have on your shopping list of software tools when you ramp your work up to increase the throughput.

Leveraging your content management system to run automated conversions becomes more important as the collection grows and the throughput of new material increases. If you open the floodgates and let your providers give you that content in any format, then connecting up your conversion tools with script mechanisms becomes vital.

The content management software controls and manages the entire operation.

Software to do this used to be expensive. Apple’s Final Cut Server lowers the price of this kind of software to a point where it starts to become affordable for managing collections of home movies, let alone enterprise-sized asset libraries. The Plone open source project delivers CMS at a price everyone can afford—free. But it is user-supported, and you may need to add features yourself. The iView Media Pro content librarian is now part of Microsoft’s Expression Suite of tools.

My Top 10 Free Tools for Mac OS
Since I work mainly on Mac OS, these are the free and low-cost tools I use most often when working with video clips and converting media from one format to another for content management experiments and research:

- iMovie
- QuickTime with Telestream Flip4Mac and Perian plug-ins
- QT_Tools, QTCoffee
- ffmpeg
- Diva
- Handbrake
- Roxio CD Spin Doctor
- MPEG-2 Works
- DivX Doctor
- BIAS SoundSoap
- Red5

These aren’t free, but I use them a lot too:

- Telestream Episode Pro
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe CS3 Production Premium
- Final Cut Studio (includes Compressor, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, etc.)
- Apple Xcode (for rolling your own custom tools)Final Cut Server (FCS) will figure as an important upgrade as soon as it is available. FCS is potentially very useful for medium-sized archive collections. It could take over the job that outgrows what you can do with iTunes and iPhoto because it should be able to manage much larger quantities of mixed media assets. FCS is extendable, so we can integrate it with existing systems or add features where necessary.

Other Alternatives
Those applications that aren’t open source and already available on Windows can be augmented by platform-specific counterpa