This will be enough to make most eyes gloss over, but my conversion from inky-fingered print journalist to multimedia contender is requiring me to make a steep dive into a deep pool of technical gloop. Come on in, the water's lovely.
I'm spending my evenings lurking furtively around bizarre forums such as lifehacker or
videohelp.com, the denizens of which have got me out of trouble a numer of times when my ambition has outstripped my technical knowledge. But with no in-house IT support (unless you count a 7-year-old who has already apparently mastered most bits of internet technology), there's no choice. My laptop is awash with bits of trial software and free downloads.
(By the way, listen to Eddie Izzard on that very subject in this clip - taken from an Amnesty podcast
here).
I even find myself dreaming of video computer file formats, of which there are a baffling number - .avi, .wmp, .mpg, .mp4, .flv, .m4v...
Today's conundrum entailed working out how to convert a Flash file (.flv), which I need for a commission I'm working on, into a format I can use with Adobe Premiere - the editing software I've been using.
If you're still with me, I'll assume you're interested enough to want to know the solution:
After recording the clip using WMRecorder (a baffling-to-use but jolly useful bit of software, more of which another time), I was directed by the videohelp.com crew to
RivaFLVEncoder. Its purpose is to convert video files into Flash format for the web, but tellingly it also works the other way round (even though it doesn't say so). For the main part of the solution, look
here. I found I needed to do the process twice - the mpg conversion worked only for the video, not the audio. The avi conversion vice versa. The two tracks could then be reconciled in Premiere.
See? Beats counting sheep.
Labels: Eddie Izzard, Flash, RivaEncoder, video file format conversion
