Edgar came over, and we started some more work on the Agua Dulce DVD. He wrote some notes for the commentary, as I tightened up the isolated score track. Jim then came over, and we went to Sandbags for lunch. Afterwards, Jim recorded his commentary portion before heading on back to work. It then took me and Edgar about 2.5 hours to records the 23-minute long commentary track. Wow, these things are NOT easy! Even though he had notes written, …
Blank DVDs
Using my new deck, I digitized two of the three videotapes my grandmother had given me back in November. Totalling about 3 hours of material, it took a little while as you couldn’t control the S-VHS portion of the deck, and as such I had to record them in segments (also cause it’s a little tedious!) and then stitch them together to create two videos: a 2-hour one, and a 1-hour one. I then boosted and cleaned the audio, and …
A Lean, Mean, Converting Machine
My JVC Pro DV/S-VHS deck finally arrived today, so I went home during lunch to set it up. The great thing about this dual deck is that it has a built in DAC, which allows for VHS and even live television feeds to be transmitted over the FireWire cable right into the computer for digitizing. I converted over the three projects I did in 1999/2000 for Jon Rosenbaum: “The Pork, The Fork and the Man From New York”, “Got Yer …
PAL Issues
Okay, this is a bit technical, so deal. Apparently an issue with converting 25i PAL video to 29.97i NTSC video is that the interlacing gets all weird, and the motion seems a bit jerky. So, I had to re-compress the MPEG-2 streams to deinterlace the source PAL AVIs, and output a progressive (non-interlaced) NTSC video stream. This gives the resulting 29.97p video a film-quality, which actually works rather well. I think the DVD is just about done! Now I just …
PAL to NTSC
While doing a little research on DVD -> AVI conversions, I came across a program called “VirtualDubMod“, a program that specifically converts a VOB file to an AVI (among a few other things). I have tried other programs in the past, but they always crashed, or wouldn’t let me save it as a DV AVI. This is why I haven’t been able to make much progress on converting Ilana’s wedding DVD (which is in PAL) to an NTSC DVD. However, …
Sweeney on DVD
I took my laserdisc player out of my living room today, and set it down on the floor next to my computers. I then plugged it into the Canopus DV Rex breakout box, which is installed in my old computer. That computer is hooked up to my NetGear router via Ethernet, and my new computer is connected in a likewise fashion. I have a 200GB FireWire drive plugged into the new computer, with file sharing turned on, sharing the drive …
Chocolate Milk
A week or so ago, I mentioned how I wanted to shoot something with my small Canon PowerShot S230 camera, since it can shoot video at 640×480 @ 15p. Well, I did just that. And the first Warm Butter Films production since Escape from CMU is finally done! I would categorize this an “art” film, of a sort… it doesn’t really have much of a point, but hey – I’ve seen MUCH worse. (Yeah, you know who you are!) So, …
Finished with the Video
Well, I finished the video for Ilana’s wedding. It took about 3 weeks, a lot of work, narration, CG rendering, titles, music, and more, but it’s done! Running about 9.5 minutes long, I’m hoping that it goes over well with the viewers…. BigSheb seemed to get a kick out of it, and thinks they’ll like it. But, we’ll see. Now I just need to burn it to DVD, miniDV, and VHS… and start packing… oy…..
X2 Delivery Update
Went to Buzz Coffee to meet up with X2-scribe Mike Dougherty. He’s now the second person I’ve delivered the X2 Scoring Session DVD to; Damon being the first one (and he loved it, which is good)! There are a lot more to deliver, including to Bryan Singer, John Ottman, Tom DeSanto, etc. etc. etc. (Looks like I might need to buy more DVD-Rs.) We had a good chat over coffee, discussing the latest trend in film music: rejecting scores, and …
The Ultimate Hardship
Got together with Ben tonight, and we watched the “Hardship in Mexico” series of short films we made, oh, 18 years ago. Talk about a trip down memory lane! We even recorded a commentary for the DVD (yes yes, I know….), and the idea of doing a more “professionally” edited version came to mind…. at least, better titles, editing, and sound effects/music. Maybe call it “The Ultimate Hardship” or something like that. lol.