He tries his hand at soundtracks...
... well, a drum track, actually.
So, like so many doting parents, we shot video of our charming little one during our recent sojourn to various pseudo-educational venues such as the zoo and the science centre, this weekend last... close to an hour of mini DV format digital video--interlaced 720x480 pixel frames--of a cute kid, playing with lego, with a big and very cool indoor track thing along which you throw balls, with some neat old percussion instruments (from China, I believe, mostly) and with a great big 'installation art' thingy kinda like a giant 3D pinball machine...
Unlike (certain) doting parents, however, I know there aren't a lot of people who will actually want to see all of this. A partisan supporter of the old Super-8 format, writing on the beauty of his favoured medium, commented that the two great things about the film cassettes were (and are) these: they're (i) short and (ii) expensive. So at most, you sit through about two minutes of Junior being unreasonably cute at once, and, in general, people actually work a little harder to put something actually interesting on a Super-8 film. Since it's pretty expensive (around $20 CDN for a colour cartridge, I believe, not including processing), there isn't much film in each cartridge, and you can't tape over it later if it's awful, they're likely to put on a reasonably punchy little show.
Video, in contrast, is the bane of all those who know people who (a) have children and (b) have neither taste nor tact about showing video to friends--an hour of the little darlings making a mess out of the cake served at their birthday (why do people even film such things, anyway?) is pretty durn painful to contemplate, even for a loving gramma who normally thinks the little darlings are just about the greatest entertainment on earth.
So I endeavoured to take the stuff on the tape and (in the parlance) punch it up a bit. And used the lovely and talented Kino (primitive by some digital video standards, but I like it because if you're careful, it's quite conservative about hanging onto the whole 720x480 frame, as opposed to certain Windows cheapo packages, and because, like all open source stuff, you can tweak it a bit if you need it to do something new) to cut all the video down to something a little more lively, snipping out bits where the lovely little one wasn't actually looking at the camera or being suitably cute, throwing in some snappy titles, and, of course...
A soundtrack.
This is just essential, really. The reality is, most audio off handheld cameras sucks, and ours (an otherwise lovely JVC) has issues with motor noise. A bit of something lively in the background can make the difference between a rather boring bit of video, and something that, at least, won't put your friends to sleep. And it imposes a certain discipline on length--think in terms of putting it over some pop song or other, and you're probably going to keep yourself to five minutes or less.
Except that the Beasties track I initially cut it to fit (timewise) really didn't fit the mood of the video, despite my best intentions. So I would up rolling my own somewhat minimalist bit of sound with a neat little drum kit package called Hydrogen, and using that instead. Which worked out pretty much okay. Adds a little spice, and much better than wild sound, which was pretty heavy on the motor noise.
Now I can't put the video online (as per discipline comments above, it's under four minutes, but four minutes of decent MPEG-2 of 720 x 480 comes out to around 125 Mb with sound, and that's a bit more than I'm going to pay to host, besides which, the thought of putting video of my daughter online strikes me as more than a bit icky), but a not great but not awful .OGG (most modern players, including WinAmp, will do OGG, which is a somewhat less encumbered equivalent to MP3) format copy of the audio track I made is here (warning to dialup types--this file is approx. 2.7 Mb).
Dig the beats, yo.
So, like so many doting parents, we shot video of our charming little one during our recent sojourn to various pseudo-educational venues such as the zoo and the science centre, this weekend last... close to an hour of mini DV format digital video--interlaced 720x480 pixel frames--of a cute kid, playing with lego, with a big and very cool indoor track thing along which you throw balls, with some neat old percussion instruments (from China, I believe, mostly) and with a great big 'installation art' thingy kinda like a giant 3D pinball machine...
Unlike (certain) doting parents, however, I know there aren't a lot of people who will actually want to see all of this. A partisan supporter of the old Super-8 format, writing on the beauty of his favoured medium, commented that the two great things about the film cassettes were (and are) these: they're (i) short and (ii) expensive. So at most, you sit through about two minutes of Junior being unreasonably cute at once, and, in general, people actually work a little harder to put something actually interesting on a Super-8 film. Since it's pretty expensive (around $20 CDN for a colour cartridge, I believe, not including processing), there isn't much film in each cartridge, and you can't tape over it later if it's awful, they're likely to put on a reasonably punchy little show.
Video, in contrast, is the bane of all those who know people who (a) have children and (b) have neither taste nor tact about showing video to friends--an hour of the little darlings making a mess out of the cake served at their birthday (why do people even film such things, anyway?) is pretty durn painful to contemplate, even for a loving gramma who normally thinks the little darlings are just about the greatest entertainment on earth.
So I endeavoured to take the stuff on the tape and (in the parlance) punch it up a bit. And used the lovely and talented Kino (primitive by some digital video standards, but I like it because if you're careful, it's quite conservative about hanging onto the whole 720x480 frame, as opposed to certain Windows cheapo packages, and because, like all open source stuff, you can tweak it a bit if you need it to do something new) to cut all the video down to something a little more lively, snipping out bits where the lovely little one wasn't actually looking at the camera or being suitably cute, throwing in some snappy titles, and, of course...
A soundtrack.
This is just essential, really. The reality is, most audio off handheld cameras sucks, and ours (an otherwise lovely JVC) has issues with motor noise. A bit of something lively in the background can make the difference between a rather boring bit of video, and something that, at least, won't put your friends to sleep. And it imposes a certain discipline on length--think in terms of putting it over some pop song or other, and you're probably going to keep yourself to five minutes or less.
Except that the Beasties track I initially cut it to fit (timewise) really didn't fit the mood of the video, despite my best intentions. So I would up rolling my own somewhat minimalist bit of sound with a neat little drum kit package called Hydrogen, and using that instead. Which worked out pretty much okay. Adds a little spice, and much better than wild sound, which was pretty heavy on the motor noise.
Now I can't put the video online (as per discipline comments above, it's under four minutes, but four minutes of decent MPEG-2 of 720 x 480 comes out to around 125 Mb with sound, and that's a bit more than I'm going to pay to host, besides which, the thought of putting video of my daughter online strikes me as more than a bit icky), but a not great but not awful .OGG (most modern players, including WinAmp, will do OGG, which is a somewhat less encumbered equivalent to MP3) format copy of the audio track I made is here (warning to dialup types--this file is approx. 2.7 Mb).
Dig the beats, yo.
posted by AJM at 2:04 p.m. (Permanent Link)
