Media Headaches

It doesn't seem like 6 or 7 minutes is that long to wait for a video to recompress into a different codec, but it really starts to add up if you have to try 8 or 9 different configurations before it

1.) works
2.) looks decent
3.) has Audio
4.) sounds decent
5.) stays in sync
and
6.) ports well to YouTube and has all of the above characteristics there.

Due to an inability on my part or on Apple Compressor's, I just burned about an hour of my life trying to figure out how to include uncompressed audio with an MPEG-2 video in a format that Quicktime could read and thus that I could upload to YouTube. Fail. And the the MPEG-4 version looked great on my machine and completely AWFUL once uploaded.

Instead, I'm going to go home and use Vegas to make a 640x480 MPEG-2 that will (hopefully) not lose sync when Youtube converts it to Flash video. I guess maybe I'm dwelling on this issue too much; there aren't any really hard sync points in this video, but I would like the music beats to coincide with the visual hits.

This is the latest headache after dealing with this promo video for most of the last 2 or 3 days. Bouncing textless/texted versions back from Sean (the latest addition to our media team), outputting the audio to get it into a platform I can actually use (Pro Tools) and mixing it here at the workplace on a Saturday night, adding last minute text for a little reinforcement of the website address.

I'm tired. I sure hope this thing makes a difference in ticket sales.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHjb8fgPdyI

(Please click on the "watch in high quality" link. Do it for me.)