Check out this awesome trailer we created for the new show Lysistrata Jones. It’s a truly fun evening, and everyone should go check it out!
This was pretty much the most amazing day ever.
A side-effect of my years-long home video project is that I’m sifting through all the old media that’s lying around my hard drives. I found a few recently that are especially funny considering what I do for a living now. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane.
A little history. While all the other kids were outside learning how to play sports, or even play video games, I was too busy messing around with cameras and computers trying to make what the Big Kids did on TV. Around my ninth birthday (judging from file dates), my parents got me this thing called a QuickCam. It hooked up to your computer via serial port, had an apparent resolution of 320×240, and was black & white.
If you were recording live-action video with it, the frame rate was limited to something like 15fps, which is really noticeable to the eye. It had pretty poor optics, too, so the shutter had to be open a really long time. The result was choppy, streaky video that looked nothing like TV. Unacceptable to nine-year-old me.
But wait! It also shot frame-by-frame stop motion, and those movies would come out at 30fps. Big win. According to the files I found, I started doing this the morning after my birthday. Here’s the first attempt:
Not bad. Short, sweet, to the point. A couple months later, things got a little more complicated.
It’s got a plot, it’s whimsical, and it attempts some Looney Tunes-esque gags. Plus, everyone loves a panda wearing a T-shirt, right? Let’s move on.
The obligatory Gumby movie. Now we’re cooking. It’s got action, a plot, multiple shots, and a twist ending. I must have felt pretty good about this, because to my knowledge this was the end of the stop-motion QuickCam videos. Or maybe I just thought black & white was too limiting.
Call me a narcissist, but one of the best parts of my job is watching the YouTube stats and comments on the videos I make. Good or bad, it doesn’t really matter; I like knowing that people are watching my work, and that some are engaged enough by them to take the time and comment. I work on these spots in relative isolation, so to see first reactions is refreshing, and pretty rewarding.
Disclaimer: this post is geeky and technical. Turn back now if you find this off-putting.
I have lots and lots of home videos. We’re talking hundreds of hours. As time goes on, though, I’m worried that these tapes will deteriorate and I won’t be able to watch them in five or ten years. So, I’ve made it my mission recently to start archiving these things digitally, not just to preserve them, but so my family can watch them fairly easily and actually use these videos as memories.
This is harder than you might even think. My family’s videos span four formats: VHS-C (those chunky little versions of VHS that held about 20 minutes each), Analog 8mm, Digital8 (Sony’s proprietary DV format), and MiniDV. I’m most concerned about the Digital8 tapes; Sony was the only company to produce or support them, and they’ve moved on now. This means that when the Digital8 decks of the world stop working, my tapes are useless. So, I’m using our aging Digital8 camcorder to start archiving in the mid-nineties since these seem to be the most at risk.
I had to spend a lot of time considering formats for the archive. Native DV video takes up about 14 GB/hour, and at about 300-400 hours of video, I wasn’t ready to commit that much space to the home videos (especially considering we’ll be keeping a backup copy of the data as well). Saving the video in some kind of MPEG2 DVD format seemed silly; DVD is on the way out, and there are better codecs now anyway. What I finally settled on was MP4 files encoded in H.264 (incidentally, the files should be ready to dump onto Blu-Ray without transcoding). True, H.264 is a delivery codec, not an archival or editing one, but I tested out the durability of my settings by recompressing the MP4 files as MPEG-2 for DVD, and there was very little noticeable degradation in the output. I’m happy with my footage being able to survive one generation of recompression.
I’m keeping the video in its native resolution of 720 x 480 interlaced. This presents its own problems, namely that computers and progressive-scan equipment will have to deinterlace and squish the video slightly in order to play the clips back correctly. But in the interest of flexibility in conversion years down the line, this seemed like a good compromise between space, viewability, and quality.
On the subject of audio, it turns out sync is a huge issue when capturing consumer home videos, especially from analog sources. I’m using the Digital8 deck to do the A/D conversion from 8mm, and apparently the audio is passed at 12-bit, 32 kHz. Almost all of my Digital8 and MiniDV footage was also recorded at this setting, apparently. Editing software hates this, and the audio falls out of sync with the picture almost every time. So I’m forced to let Final Cut upsample the audio before touching the captured footage at all.
From there, I’m breaking each tape into days or events (right in Compressor) and saving the MP4 files in the format “YYYY-MM-DD_DescriptionHere.mp4″. I figure even if networked playback systems can’t deal with metadata, this will at least let us sort the events chronologically, and get a vague idea of what we’re looking for.
It’ll be interesting to see if what I’m doing is actually as future-proof as I hope it is. It’s frustrating to think that digital video, perfect copies of bits and bytes, may be susceptible to obsolescence down the line. But we’ll still have the tapes as a line of last defense, and as long as I don’t kill the playback equipment over the course of the project, we’ll never have to use it (and degrade it) again. The process seems ridiculous, but it’s already paying off. As David Pogue of the NY Times coincidentally wrote recently, I’m really enjoying watching the tapes as they’re capturing. And that’s the kind of experience I hope to make possible years from now by having this archive at our fingertips.
OK, so I’ve got this blog, here. And it hasn’t been touched or updated in about three months. And I’ve offered no explanation. Whoops. Simply put, life has just started getting in the way of producing these ditties every day, and it seems kind of silly to make them sporadically, since the whole game was that I needed to make one each and every day. It was an ongoing challenge, and it’s what made it fun for everyone.
So, that said, I’m not going to make the claim that Ditty a Day is dead forever. It’s just on a temporary hiatus, until I find myself with some more steady time to actually devote to making it a regular, ongoing thing again. Sorry if you enjoyed hearing the ditties – they’re still here, for your repeat pleasure, and there will probably be more in the unspecified future.
In the meantime, though, please enjoy this clip, showing just a little bit of what I have been up to recently. (And come see the show on November 7, if you’re so inclined! I’m the MD!)
I’m away for the day, so sadly, there’s no ditty. So instead, I give you Paul and Storm, two men who every day give me hope that there is a market for the silly things I do. They basically get paid to perform fake jingles live!
I just found this video of some really interesting “electronic” music (sorry this has become a video blog lately):
Now, I’m on the fence about this one. This is one sick set of musical instruments, with some really innovative alternatives to sequencing and sampling, and their hearts seem to be in the right place.
My problem, though, is with the creative choices that these people seem to be making in performance. I just don’t like what they’re doing musically. And it’s a crying shame, because the instruments and sounds they’re using all seem like they could add up to something a lot more listenable and interesting. It all just sounds like an elaborate proof-of-concept to me.
The beat structures aren’t particularly stable, the synth chords don’t really go anywhere, and nothing has much shape. I’m not saying that all good music needs these things, but in a situation like this, when the variable and novelty is the sonic pallet itself, I’d much prefer something with traditional structure interpreted through novel sounds. (The one exception in my mind is the marimba chairs at the end, but that’s not even part of their sequencer setup.)
Has anyone heard these guys play anything else? Are there better songs around?
