Well, we went a little overkill on this project which was intended as a simple introduction into the world video editing/post-production.  Before I get into the details of what the project involved, take a gander at the final product: A six minute video clip (incl. sound) compiling scenes from various parts of one of our favorite games, Final Fantasy (from SquareSoft).

Now that we've wowed you with our amazing video, we have to step down from our pedestal and admit that this project wasn't as involved as you might think.  Firstly remember that this was a video post-production project... that means that we aren't directly responsible for the creation of most of the video clips in the movie and we obviously didn't orchestrate the music ourselves!

So how did we do it?  We were fortunate enough to have access to a full gamut of Discreet hardware and software (in case you don't know, they are a Montreal based maker of internationally recognized video editing software used in the production of just about every major film and TV project).

• Firstly, we set out to dump all the potential video clips that we'd want to use directly from a Playstation game console onto Digital BetaCam tapes (this was actually NOT a trivial task).
• From there we converted all BetaCam clips into digital form on the SGI Octane being used for editing.  ie. All those video clips were stored fully uncompressed in NTSC quality locally on the hard disk!
• Then we came up with a nice story board which pieced together an interesting mosaic of storylines between a number of the various Final Fantasy video games.
• On to the music!  We chose some great orchestral arrangements common for Final Fantasy.
• Now the fun (and exhausting) part.  Using Discreet's award winning Flame software.  We spliced together the clips of our storyboard into one single long clip using various transition effects, filters, etc.  All the long making sure that we were in sink with the final music track which was chosen.  Ahhh, 4 minutes of beautiful video!
• One last thing to do!  Take credit for our work.  We used Discreet's 3d studio max to create our 3D logo (the TP Productions logo) and used Discreet's Frost software to put together a nice introduction fly-through and animated credits.  Once well pieced together to the music, this was also dumped to disk for use in Flame.
• So that's it!  We stuck the introductory and ending credits onto our main video and voila!  The final product was a beatiful digital quality movie clip which we are more than proud of.
• Unfortunately, from there we had to degrade our results to BetaCam and then VHS for our in class presentation.  Even more traumatic was the final compression down into the 320x200 resolution MPeg compressed video clip avilable on this web page.  All that work!  Oh well, I think it's still very nice.

That's the end of the story, we hope you enjoyed our little video clip.
Toulouse & Patrick