A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video (v3)

NOTE: A newer version of these guides can be found here.

Welcome to ErMaC and AbsoluteDestiny's guides to all things audio and video version 3!

As of version 3, this guide is being maintained primarily by Zarxrax.

These guides are designed to give you an insight into the theory behind audio and video and also to show you how to get some of the best looking and sounding AMVs that you can using software in Windows. Please note that this guide is intended to be read in its ENTIRETY. If you simply skip around, it is VERY likely that you will be confused.

You can download this guide for offline viewing by clicking here.

Getting Started

Download AMVApp 3.0

Theory Guides:

Video Basics

Television Video, Digital Video, Framerates, Resolutions and Aspect Ratios

Understanding Audio

What Makes Audio Sound
Digital Audio
Quantization
Normalization
What a waveform actually shows you

The Big Picture

Interlaced vs. Progressive,
Fields vs. Frames,
3:2 pulldown and Inverse Telecine

Colorspace

YUV and RGB and why they are very important to you

The Ins and Outs of Audio Compression.

How Audio Compresses
MP3 Compression
Psychoacoustics and Masking Sounds
Bitrates
CBR and VBR
Joint Stereo

The Ins and Outs of Video Compression

What is Video Compression, Lossless Compression, Lossy Compression, Intra-frame and Inter-frame Compression

Codecs and Containers

Containers, Editable Codecs,
Distribution Codecs

Multimedia Frameworks

Quicktime, Video for Windows,
DirectShow, FFMPEG

Advanced Aspect Ratios

PAR, DAR and SAR

Producing your AMV:

The AMVapp, AVIsynth, AvsP and VirtualDub

Installing the AMVapp

VirtualDub: What it is, how it works and why you need to use it!

AviSynth & AvsP: What they are and why you need to use them too!

Getting your Video

Overview - Read this!

How to get your footage into something you can edit.

Options for Video Sources

- Using Various Media Files for Footage

- Ripping DVD Footage (vob files)

- Indexing your DVD footage with DGIndex and loading the d2v files into an avisynth script

- Analyzing the DVD Footage
    (-Is it Interlaced?
    - Interlacing Methods)

- Restoring Progressive Frames

- Dealing with Aspect Ratios

- Cleaning up the footage

- Deciding what to do with the avisynth file(s)

- Making Clips or
- Editing avs files directly or
- Editing with Proxy files

Getting your Audio

Introduction

How to get perfect audio copies from -

CDs

DVDs

Downloaded Audio

Video Files


Editing and Preparing your audio

Editing your music/song so it's shorter


Editing your AMV:

Setting up a Video Editing Project

(Edit your video here)

Exporting Your AMV Ready For Compression

Post Production:

Post Production

Before you begin
Removing any Interlacing
Aspect Ratios and Frame Sizes
Improving visual quality and compressibility

Online Video Distribution

Compressing to MPEG-1 (poor quality/filesize):

Compressing to MPEG-1

Compressing to an XviD AVI (good quality/filesize):

Compressing to XviD

Compressing to H.264 MPEG-4 (best quality/filesize):

Compressing to H.264 with Zarx264gui

Guidelines for sending your video to a convention

Guidlines for sending your video to a convention