Snake Farm III

I actually managed to finish cutting clips and laying them on the timeline yesterday evening. I still need to create something as an opening - at the moment the first thing you see is a cut straight into the first shot (a fifteen-foot albino boa constrictor). Since the last clip is a map showing how to get to the farm, zoomed and rotated, I'm thinking a similar zoom-rotate shot as the first clip might "bookend" the whole thing nicely. The question is what exactly to zoom and rotate...

Anyway once I have something in place I can finish up the backing music. I have the beginnings of a "jungle" theme but it still needs a lot of work.

I also have an idea for a couple of pan/zoom overlays that might add some interest to what is otherwise not much more than a slideshow. However, from what I've read on the Vegas Movie Studio forum I'm not sure that what I have in mind is possible - apparently if you zoom out to create a picture-in-picture effect, you can't then use pan and keyframes to move it around the screen. To me that sounds strange, so I'll be doing a little experimentation to make sure of this.

Snake Farm II

With Christmas and all going on, I haven't spent much time on the Snake Farm video at all. I've categorized the different clips into media bins to make them easier to work with, and I've trimmed a handful and got them into the timeline, and that's about it.

Part of the problem is that I'm an incurable gamer, and amongst other things I got games for Christmas - Donny got me a copy of F.E.A.R. which I've been playing since Monday; Kate got me Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Serious Sam II, which I'm not even going to install until I've played F.E.A.R. through to the end.

I'll have to impose a bit of self-discipline to stay focused on the video work first and save the games for later.

For Christmas I also got a DVD burner and a 300Gb USB hard drive - so now I can create my own DVDs directly from DVD Architect on my own machine instead of having to move an MPEG file to my office laptop for burning, and also I now have plenty of disk space for capturing and working on video. I actually created a menu-based DVD of the reptile expo video the other day and it looks great, considering it was thrown together in just a few minutes.

So tonight, assuming I can get a couple of hours in, I'm determined to push some more on the Snake Farm video and if possible at least get all the clips laid down on the timeline. Depending on how well that goes I may spend a little while working on some backing music for it too, but I'm guessing I won't have much time for that.

Snake Farm I

I recaptured the video footage from the Snake Farm (which isn't actually a farm - it's more like a small zoo) using the FireWire this time instead of USB. What a difference - Vegas Movie Studio imports the video and splits each take into its own file on the fly, so I don't have to go through manually this time. I'm hoping it fixes the audio/video sync problem that the USB caused too.

So now I have an empty project with all the media clips ready - it took me three or four days to get to this point with the Reptile Expo movie.

I'm stepping back a bit while I think about what to do this time. In the reptile expo I got about 45 minutes of raw footage which rendered down to a 15-minute documentary by the time I'd trimmed out footage that was unusable because of bad camerawork. I hope to get better with practice, but for now I'm guessing that on average I get one minute of usable footage for every three minutes of raw material. I got about 15 minutes at the Snake Farm so I'm guessing my end result is going to be about 5 minutes long - hardly what I'd call a documentary. So what I have in mind is to pull a few seconds footage of each animal, synchronize the cuts with the background music beat and just create a kind of slideshow without narration.

I also have an idea for a map at the end to show where the farm is - to do that I'll start with a still of a map then rotate it and zoom in simultaneously to a certain point, then freeze it and add a text overlay showing how to find the place.

I'm really not happy with the way vidiLife messed with my video so I'm looking at another couple of places to host the files - YouTube.com and PutFile.com have been recommended and the first one looks pretty good (I haven't looked at PutFile yet).

Move over, Spielberg - part XIX

The video is up and live...HERE.

I put it in Vidilife.com but it may not stay there - for some reason their system "processed" my video file, adding in their logo at the start of the video. I originally uploaded three different renders for different download speeds (56k modem and a couple of higher speeds) but the lower-speed renders have disappeared.

Next video project will be the Snake Farm, which should go a lot quicker now that I'm a good way up the Vegas Movie Studio learning curve. But, I'm going to take a break for a few days before I start into that.

Move over, Spielberg - part XVIII

I have a first cut complete and ready to roll. I have no illusions about the quality - I know the camera work could be a little less shaky; I know I'm not a professional voice performer; I know some of the audio has background sounds that are distracting (in particular, some guy talking loudly somewhere near me when I was recording the lady from the reptile shelter - I didn't notice him at the time but on the playback it's almost painful to listen to). In the process of making this one I've learned a bunch, so in future I'll be able to do better.

The question is, where to host? I was planning on putting it on Google's video hosting service but to do that I'll have to re-render as MPEG2 or MPEG4 with MP3 audio. Also, it looks like Google is a way to sell videos - not that I have a problem with people paying for my work, but for one thing this documentary has a very limited market (mainly the exhibitors at the show, I think) and secondly I don't feel right about charging for this one. I found a couple of other places for free hosting but they have their own problems - for example, one has a 20Mb limit... and the high-quality render I have is 125Mb.

I'll be spending a little time later today looking around some more to see where I can find to host the stuff. If I find somewhere I can put it as-is I may upload it today; if not, or if I need to re-render in a different format it'll probably be tomorrow - I say "probably" because we're forecast snow, and the way people drive around here I have no intention of sharing the roads with them if there's ice and snow on the floor.

Move over, Spielberg - part XVII

Very, very close

I recorded the narration script yesterday and added it to the project timeline; I've also added the background music. Since I only have another couple of weeks before the next reptile expo I decided to use some ready-done royalty-free music for the music rather than trying to write my own.

There are just four things left to do: first, two or three sections of the narration don't sound so good, so I think I'm going to re-record them; second, in one particular spot the music doesn't give the right atmosphere (jolly, happy music for a Brown Recluse spider? I don't think so); third, the sound balance isn't right - the narration track needs to be a little louder relative to the background music; finally, I really need to do a better job with the production logo.

Just another hour or two should do it...

Move over, Spielberg - part XVI

Last night I shuffled a few pieces of video around on the timeline and fixed a couple of problems I'd noticed. It looks a little better every day.

More importantly I've finished writing out the script for the narration track. I'll probably have to make adjustments on the fly when I'm editing it in, but I think it's very close to how it'll be in the finished documentary. All that remains is to actually record it then edit it in. The final steps will be to add the backing music track and create a new production logo. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this over the weekend and upload it Monday - in plenty of time for the next expo, which is on December 17.

Move over, Spielberg - part XV

Kate helped me with getting the end credits looking better - simple changes like a better choice of fonts and colours can make all the difference. I want to slow down the speed the credits scroll at, so I'm going to add another couple of Kate's stills to the four that are already there as background so that I can stretch out the credit scroll on the timeline. That should do the trick.

The production logo I have at the moment was thrown together and isn't very good so I'm considering it a placeholder and I'm going to create a new one from scratch. Kate told me she has a couple of ideas for that, so let's see what we can come up with. I must remember to add a copyright notice.

I shuffled a couple of events around on the timeline, then made a draft render as a small-format AVI. Now I can review this to spot any places that need more work and also to give me something to work with while timing the narration. On playing it through I spotted a section that needs the audio & video synced better, and a discontinuity I missed that needs a cross-fade to make it look cleaner.

Still working on the narration track script - at a guess I'd say I'm about half finished.