Media Missionary Focus

Rendering and Re-Rendering...

A few hours ago I went into my studio expecting to find my computer had finally completed a task it had started about 24 hours earlier. Well, that’s what I expected…

So what exactly was taking my computer 24 hours to do? About 2 and a half minutes of video. Seriously! Welcome to the world of digital effects.

Whenever you take digital video, put it in the computer, and change it in some way, it needs to be “rendered”. Let me give you example to help explain what that means. In the case of the project my computer was working on, I had been doing an interview segment for a video project I was working on. Unfortunately, when I went to film the interview at the subject’s house we ran into a problem; there was a LOUD wedding party that had started down the street a few houses, so we couldn’t film where we had planned. To solve this dilemma we went to my studio where I filmed the interview with the subject in front of a “green screen”. My plan was to go back later and digitally put in a nice background, so that instead of the subject being in a big green walled room, we would give the interview a totally new context, like a nice outdoor scene. The process is called “chroma keying” or “vector keying”, and is basically what you see on the evening news when they do the weather; the weather man is standing in front of a large blank wall that is either blue or green and the map they refer to and point at doesn’t exist except inside a computer program that combines the images into what you see each night.

So the next step was I filmed a few minutes of a nice background footage. Finally, yesterday morning I combined the two video clips in a special computer program. That program shows you roughly what the final clip will look like, but before it is ready to use in the final video it first has to be rendered. That’s the process where the computer redraws each individual frame, combining the two original source pieces into a new piece of footage. The video format I was working with has 25 frames per second, so for the entire 2 and a half minutes the computer had to draw 3,750 frames that are at DVD quality and size. The amount of time it takes to do this depends on how many effects, filters and changes you have made to the clips. In this case there were a lot of changes and things. In the end, assuming everything works the way it is supposed to, you have a completely new clip that has some things in common with the original, but has been made new and transformed into something original.

Unfortunately, the program I am using to do this vector keying is new (new to me that is), and I am still trying to find ways to get the best results. Yesterday, when I started the rendering process, I decided to try saving the final product in a new format to see if I could get a bit better quality. So when I looked at the finished product this morning, I had a bit of a surprise. The format I had chosen wasn’t compatible with my main editing program. What does that mean? It means I wasted about 24 hours of computer time and was back to square one! This digital video animal is something you keep learning day by day; there is no “I’ve got it now, I have all the answers.” So Monday I will start the process again and see what we end up with.

On the whole, digital editing and rendering is a lot like life as a disciple of Jesus Christ. God takes who we were, and puts our life into a new context to create something that still resembles the original, but at the same time is completely new and original. But just like rendering, it’s not an instant process. When I make the changes to the original video clips and save the project, the changes are done, but they still take time to render out so that the rest of the world can see them. When Jesus comes into our life, we are transformed. Immediately we become children of God. But the process of working that out in our lives so that the rest of the world can see it takes some time. And when rendering digital video, occasionally some problem comes up and something doesn’t go as planned and you have to go back to the original source video and project files and start rendering all over again. The same goes for our walk with God. We sometimes make mistakes and the product that comes out for the world to see isn’t exactly what was intended, and we have to go back and ask God to help conform us to His image.

So Monday I will once again start rendering this video interview to create a new video clip that will fit in with my overall plan for this video project, and Monday once again the Holy Spirit will start rendering my life into a new creation that will fit with God’s overall plan for my life and for Cambodia.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 1:27 PM