Digital Media Tools for Architects and Designers

So there we were, logged on to YouTube, staring at the monitor glassy eyed and naïve. We submitted our search for “modern, architecture, Seattle” and guess what we came up with. Nothing. Not a single entry. It was like cresting the Cascade mountain range and finding all the waterfront property on the west coast entirely vacant. Our wild-west epiphany was a few months ago now – and in the meantime we’ve asked some of our experienced friends, like the sharp shooters over at Chase Jarvis Photography, about video generation, editing and sharing. We’ve stumbled around a bit, experimented, and now understand the process enough to share some useful information. Here’s why you should get your work up on YouTube and how to do it.

Why:
1. Bandwidth is continually on the increase so venues like YouTube are faster and more accessible from more computers.
2. Sharing your work through video clips communicates more. The process of design and construction can be communicated through time-elapsed images. A better understanding of complex volumes and spatial experiences can be conveyed.
3. Design ideas and construction progress can be communicated to clients who live elsewhere or travel frequently.
4. It’s another way to back-up your work on a remote server (it’s also free)
5. Your work is visible to a wider audience.

Here are some amateur examples by your friends at BUILD:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzcaEqYbkFI]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WghZAdRLpQ0]

How:
1. You’ll need a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 4 – its a hundred bucks and can be purchased in the box or downloaded here. A downside of the program is that it is 463 MB, yikes.

2. Generate .MPEG or .AVI animations in any number of digital modeling programs you may be using (Form-Z, Rhino, Sketch-up, 3-D Studio Max, etc).

3. Generate the title and credit pages as static images in Adobe Illustrator or any number of similar graphics programs. Save them as JPEGs.
4. Using Premiere: compared to the complexity of digital modeling programs, Premier is Mickey Mouse. Playing around on it for a couple of hours should teach you most everything you’ll need to know. While there are hundreds of tools within Premiere, we find that only a handful are actually useful and tasteful. Here are a couple of basic concepts and tools:
A. Images, movie clips and music clips are imported into Premiere and dragged to the timelines below. Right-hand click on a timeline to add, remove or purge timelines.