The BitBull Blog

I used to use iMovie for promo videos until Apple changed it from a very simple, flexible and useable tool into the pile of arcane, prescriptive and utterly useless garbage that it is now. For the last few years I’ve been using Apple’s Quicktime 7 pro which, ironically, was much more suited to task than the ‘new and improved (read ‘ruined’) iMovie.

But, Quicktime 7 Pro was not going to cut it (pun intended) for this task so I decided to try Adobe Premiere. Overall I found it a good application for the task in hand though getting the settings right was somewhat time consuming, I’ll therefore detail the process here.

1. Capturing The Video

I thought initially that I’d capture video from the iOS Simulator. Bad idea. It runs much too slowly. Next attempt was to run Floppy Frog on the iPad and capture using Reflector as an Airplay Receiver. Again, bad idea. Frame rate was OK but quality wasn’t up to scratch.

Third attempt was to run the Android version of Floppy Frog using the GenyMotion emulator and capture using the excellent Snapz Pro. Success! GenyMotion runs Floppy Frog just as fast as it would on device and Snapz Pro is a highly configurable and useable screen capture tool. It even captured the audio without a hitch. Had to purchase the full version of GenyMotion to get rid of the ‘free for personal use’ message but I don’t begrudge them that as it’s a fantastic piece of software at a reasonable price.

GenyMotion also has the benefit of being able to configure device display height/width so you can set up a virtual device that’s ideal for the video format you want to capture. In this case my video will run on YouTube at HD 1280*720. Floppy Frog is a portrait game so I wanted a device size that wouldn’t look too ‘squished’ within the HD landscape frame, therefore I set up a virtual device of 600*720 and captured at this size at 30fps which is the frame rate at which the game runs.

2. Import The Video Into Premiere

You’d expect this bit to be easy, and it is easy to simply import the captured video into Premiere. Where I ran into difficulties was that Premiere organises all video into a ‘sequence’ and setting up a ‘sequence’ that matched my video capture settings seemed impossible. All I could do was choose from a series of preset sequences and changing the preset sequence settings was not allowed for some reason. The key issue was that none of the preset sequences ran at 30fps, only 29.97 fps and when Premiere attempted to match my 30fps captured video to the 29.97 sequence settings I was getting horrible interlacing effects.

The solution was to start the Premiere project with any old sequence settings, import the captured video, then select the captured video and choose ‘New Sequence From Clip’. This creates a new sequence matching the captured video settings exactly. Only issue was my video was captured at 600*720 and I wanted a video running at 1280*720! Solution: capture a few seconds of random 1280*720 30fps video using Snapz Pro, import into Premiere, then create the sequence from this. The 600*720 video can now be dragged into this new sequence no problem and the 1280*720 capture can be deleted from the project.

Next issue (which most people probably won’t run into) is that my sound hardware runs at a 48khz sample rate whereas my video was captured at a 48khz sample rate. For some reason Premiere seems pretty flaky about converting between the two (whatever the project Audio settings) so I had to make sure my captured video was saved with the audio running at a 48khz sample rate.

3. Export The Video For YouTube

Once the video is comped together in Premiere it has to be exported at high-quality for uploaded to YouTube. I got and tweaked ‘export media’ settings from a YouTube tutorial and they might be slightly overkill quality-wise but I’ve added screenshots on the right…

4. Sit Back And Watch The Traffic Roll In

Or maybe not. But here’s the finished product anyway…