Doin' the Video thing.
This is just a rant on Technology and the time consuming nature the digital age has brought to us. I just finished working on the most consuming set of video clips from the March 2009 Kahuku MX race. It has taken HOURS...no make that days. Usually video is straight forward, tell your story in about 3 to 4 minutes, add a sound track, a few effects and boom it's done. Ohhh No not this time around. 15 solid minutes of video, 65 separate clips to boil down and a program (or my PC) that wants to crash at the worst of times which sets me back to square one.
You try different work flows like choosing the sound track first and getting it loaded and then filling in the clips and effects. Sometime this works and other times not. It was one of those "not" days I guess becaus
e the sound tracks kept moving around, disappearing from the time line and just playing havoc with this whole project. If I move too fast the whole thing crashes not to mention that it took a few hours of installing and uninstalling programs to try and narrow down why things weren't working like normal. I mean why couldnt I import the 2 sound tracks from the CD? What was causing this gigantic cluster bumb? Nothing was going right, nothing.
So what do you start doing? Well the chosen way for this project was to start "saving" the project after each edit. I must have hit the "save button" a 150 times till I finished the project late Saturday morning. So then it was done and we packed up for a trip to Kahuku to go ride for a couple of hours. I decided that I would render it and upload it to the servers later that evening.
After the return from riding I did render it to MPEG form and ya know it just looked crappy. Pixelated to the max and really really poor quality even though I set the preferences to highest quality output. Something is up here and that line from the movie "Apollo 13" comes to mind where Tom Hanks say "uh...Houston...we have a problem". But maybe it was just my imagination so I uploaded it to the servers about 11:00 pm Saturday night.
You try different work flows like choosing the sound track first and getting it loaded and then filling in the clips and effects. Sometime this works and other times not. It was one of those "not" days I guess becaus
e the sound tracks kept moving around, disappearing from the time line and just playing havoc with this whole project. If I move too fast the whole thing crashes not to mention that it took a few hours of installing and uninstalling programs to try and narrow down why things weren't working like normal. I mean why couldnt I import the 2 sound tracks from the CD? What was causing this gigantic cluster bumb? Nothing was going right, nothing.So what do you start doing? Well the chosen way for this project was to start "saving" the project after each edit. I must have hit the "save button" a 150 times till I finished the project late Saturday morning. So then it was done and we packed up for a trip to Kahuku to go ride for a couple of hours. I decided that I would render it and upload it to the servers later that evening.
After the return from riding I did render it to MPEG form and ya know it just looked crappy. Pixelated to the max and really really poor quality even though I set the preferences to highest quality output. Something is up here and that line from the movie "Apollo 13" comes to mind where Tom Hanks say "uh...Houston...we have a problem". But maybe it was just my imagination so I uploaded it to the servers about 11:00 pm Saturday night. Sunday morning I checked and it was successful but when I went to the site it said "rejected" because it was 16 minutes long. "Uh Houston...we have a problem" this should be a little over 3 minutes long, not 16. So what do you do. Yes of course you think there is something wrong on their end, just like there was something wrong with my computer which was causing all this humbug. So I sent it up a second time to the servers (which takes a long time) and it was rejected again.
It has been said that "once all the technical possibilities have been ruled out, you must look at the obvious and most easy of solutions". You may have guessed already...human error. It was human error that tried to up load the entire 16 minutes of clips to the servers instead of the 3 minute video and it was human error that kept saving and re-saving MPEG files (instead of the programs own files) which deteriorated the files with every push of the save button. And finally it was human error that tried to import the wrong type of sound track files into the program to begin with although I found this out early on in this whole mess.
There are multiple morals to this story and now that I've spilled and spelled out my failings on this project I do feel a little better. The final product that finally made it to the servers is ok but because I wanted to get it done and be up by Sunday night I just whipped it together. Who knows I may red0 it again now that I know what the heck I am doing.
It has been said that "once all the technical possibilities have been ruled out, you must look at the obvious and most easy of solutions". You may have guessed already...human error. It was human error that tried to up load the entire 16 minutes of clips to the servers instead of the 3 minute video and it was human error that kept saving and re-saving MPEG files (instead of the programs own files) which deteriorated the files with every push of the save button. And finally it was human error that tried to import the wrong type of sound track files into the program to begin with although I found this out early on in this whole mess.
There are multiple morals to this story and now that I've spilled and spelled out my failings on this project I do feel a little better. The final product that finally made it to the servers is ok but because I wanted to get it done and be up by Sunday night I just whipped it together. Who knows I may red0 it again now that I know what the heck I am doing.
-scott
posted by Scott at
1:05 PM
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