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.)

General Update; Low on introspection.

As I was getting ready to leave my apartment for yet another derby event, I realized that there was no way in hell I'd fit everything I needed in my shoulder bag. I needed a laptop for some last-minute editing of backup audio material, the audio interface for that, some microphone cables from my personal stash, an extra microphone, blah blah blah, the brownies I baked for the skaters, and my whiskey flask. So I put the fixed-gear away and lowered my blue touring bike down from the hoist on the ceiling. I loaded all my bags onto the rack and put all of my necessary effects in there and rolled out. Since I hadn't ridden that bike in several months, it was immediately striking how differently it handled than my other bike, especially with a fair amount of gear attached. It's such a heavier ride and the center of mass is so much further back that the turns and even straightaways when standing up feel more... substantial. It's a slower ride, for sure, than my yellow bike, but also somewhat smoother. At any rate, I started thinking about bike tours and I think I'm going to try to go back to France this summer for a couple of weeks, or maybe to Spain. I think my Spanish is at a point where I could use a little immersion to help it along. Sometimes when I'm on the metro and I have forgotten my book, I play a little Scrabble mini-game on my phone (it's not really Scrabble, unfortunately; it's more like Boggle) and I regularly see words in French and Spanish that I of course can't use. It's a small reminder that I need to put my language skills to use more often than I do.

As the readership knows, I do a lot of media work for LADD I am most proud of the latest highlight video. I get more and more comments from skaters and fans that these really help get everyone pumped and ready for the game. Last night a skater even told me that sometimes when watching the videos she starts to tear up! This one is a collaboration between Vince (the media clip montage) and myself (the music portion):


There were some skaters from the local flat-track league, Angel City Derby Girls who saw our media presentation and were impressed, so they asked about the possibility of us cutting together a promo reel to get some press attention. I'm going to talk to them this week about it.

After much unnecessary nervousness and anticipation, I did a test edit for American Gladiators and showed it to the mixer and he liked it. It's a higher profile show and the mixer is very particular about the edit. So I had to sort of prove myself to him, and now I'm editing dialog for that show this season, and I might still be doing the same graphic sound effects placement that I did last season as well. I started the dialog today and I'll be working on that first episode for the next couple of days. It's going to be as busy as ever.