Project Background
This project originally began a few months ago. My Swai Jiao school documented a 2-day seminar at the end of August, 2009, with the goal of possibly creating training videos of the private sessions. We have footage from multiple cameras shooting simultaneously, which is great for providing a range of angles. Multiple sources also means there is a range of video containers, with different naming conventions, clip lengths, dimensions, codecs and framerates. Collecting all of the videos alone was a challenge, taking a few weeks in all.

Conversion and Import = Fail
My main multimedia system was a Dell XPS Gen2 desktop-replacement laptop built nearly 5 years ago. The XPS has been good to me over the past few years, whether working on various multimedia projects or occasional gaming. I started out converting the hodgepodge collection of videos into something Adobe Premiere CS 1.5 could stomach, using a combination of VirtualDub and FFmpeg. This stage took place over another few weeks as I would let videos convert overnight when I had time. When I finally started importing the converted videos into Premiere, my system was showing it’s age. I soon found importing hundreds of videos was not possible, as it would completely freeze my system. Even limiting the project bins to just a few videos, the CPU and RAM would be pegged out just with the import alone. Trying to synchronize more than two videos together was a pain, since it was too choppy to tell what was going on.

As one possible option, I could have created a duplicate set of compressed/low-quality videos to work with, then attempted to swap in the high-quality versions to render the end result. I’m just not sure my system would let me accomplish that last part.

Project, Part Duex
That brings us back to now. Next case study post, I’ll detail my restart of the project with new hardware and software!