A typical weekday, reviewing footage of Kye Kye during "lunch".

I'm sitting here at a fast food place eating lunch. I'm having a chocolate shake with my Arby's Jr sandwiches. The shake kind of reminds me of the shakes at Cornerstone, but there's a lot less heat in here.

On the table sits a couple of small sized portable USB drives attached to the little MacBook. I'm streaming a rip of the Kye Kye video and reviewing it.

The DVD was mastered last night and I ripped a copy of it to iPad format. I'm playing that quicktime on the Macbook and looking at it. The quality is okay, but of course lower resolution than the quicktime master file. The quicktime master is about 4.1 gigs in size. Small enough to burn on a data DVD and mail it off to the band. The quicktime master should play on a PC, so the band shouldn't have a problem watching that as well.

The DVD burn went okay, but the menu is messed up a bit. Also I don't have any credits on the end of the video. I guess this is kind of a test burn and I'll probably review the audio in a few systems before the final burn for the band. I have to decide whether to add credits to the end for them I may just leave the end of the video without credits, maybe I'll just put my name on a video credit at the end. There is enough room that they can put credits on or I could send them another one with credits per their request.

The chapter menu is missing a music cut from the band. A background music sound track and also the default moving animation from Apple iDVD is missing from the chapter menu. The style is a 16:9 "revolution" setting. This provides a scrolling and rotating movie feature like opening in the menus. I'm not sure why the chapter part of the menu didn't rip, I didn't see any errors, but something was missed. Maybe I didn't construct the DVD menu correctly. I'll double check it before the next DVD master. This DVD is a quick little DVD performance. Also I have only the final audio mix on this of mine, not the raw unchanged mix from the recording. I may include that in a separate rip or rip two versions of the performance on one DVD, one after the other. I'm leaning on putting each audio mix on a different DVD, or just sending the raw recorded audio and letting the band use it if they have some kind of need or desire to tweak it. The DVD just holds a 30 minute performance.

THE NEXT DVD BURN
I'm going to have to export out another DVD from iDVD. Of course I'll double check the menus. I was tempted to send Kye Kye this current rip even with the menus not totally working. They work, but the chapter one doesn't animate correctly. This DVD like the Iona one, will not play on my high level Sony DVD recorder at home for some reason. It plays on other DVD's. The Sony rejects these kinds of burns from Apple iDVD, something about the header menu perhaps is unrecognized by that Sony HDR-900 recorder.

Looks like there will be a day delay to rip another DVD and review it. For now I want to stop by my friends house and see this DVD play on his surround system. The band sounded awesome on his surround system with an earlier rip example. Kye Kye will sound better on a surround system than a standard TV. There's just something about this mix that doesn't translate well to a normal speaker system on a television.

This latest DVD rip was ripped using the "PROFESSIONAL encoding setting". The best quality possible is obtained with PROFFESSIONA compression. iDVD put the 30 minute show in a VIDEO_TS folder that ended up being around 2 gigs in size. That size is quite large for a 30 minute video. The multi-pass encode to get from iMovie to iDVD was in the four hour range. I'll have to do another four hour encode to add credits in iMovie.

iDVD must have seen the settings and length of the movie and decided to encode it at a higher bit rate, perhaps the max possible for a single sided dvd at standard resolution. That should make the DVD look better in theory and it looks pretty good compared to the usual "default setting" which iDVD often uses. The standard setting doesn't compress the video much, with a lower quality output.

The Quicktime master looks pretty good. It makes me wonder if the movie would play well on my PC and what the SRS WOW surround effect will sound like on my little Toshiba laptop. The SRS WOW effect probably won't work for the DVD, I haven't tested the DVD on my PC yet. I haven't checked the Kye Kye Master quicktime file a PC either.

Watching the slideshow that Kye Kye has out on youtube makes me wonder. Maybe I could do some kind of crop and zoom effects in some kind of quick sync with the imovie to give this a different feel. Could I produce multiple zoomed angled and a much faster paced video? Probably but I'm not going to try to make a music video out of a simple production. The band can do what they want with the video if they decide to do something with it.

I'll leave that speculation and test for later video adventures.

I also stopped by a local Best Buy and picked up another external USB drive for the next band or artist I start to edit. I was looking at portable drives with the mind of purchasing one or two to mail them to bands with all the source video on them. I'm not sure how I'll send source footage to the bands yet. USB drives seem easy, but I need to get a feel for how software can import cut down versions of the Sony AVCHD footage and camera files. In other words can I send the smaller versions of a days shoot on the drives and how much space would each show take. And how much media is involved.

In theory the AVCHD files are all less than 4 gigs in size. This means all the source video files could fit individually on DVD disks. That might be cheaper than copying files to a USB drive or external key, but then I might be burning up to ten data DVD disks and the bands would have to reconstruct the file structures perhaps to digitize the cameras and re-edit or reuse the master footage.

There's some experimentation I need to do. Also the Sony SR-11 camcorder has the video on it's drive and that is mounted as a camera. That camera has a lot of footage on it, and I can't just do an Imovie camera archive and send a digital copy of that to each band, because they'd end up getting all those other bands on the same camera angle with their footage. So I have to see if I can copy a part of that and how easy it is to get the individual band footage on a type of folder/directory and how easy that would be for a band to use. Could they use that. I'm hoping I don't have to do a backup of the entire SR-11 to disk, then delete all the other footage, reexport the sony footage for each band and reimport the original each time. That would add a lot of time, but it might be necessary in the gathering of source video for each band.

Well that's enough talking about video processing steps inside the computer.

Programmers love to talk about processes and process steps, usually about their own programming. Talking about the various steps performed in a computer by an editor is almost the same thing and useless to most blog readers.

If a person is exporting out 720p (720 horizontal resolution) footage, they might be able to get away with zooming in and out and reframing 1080i footage for their "standard" definition video. This is perhaps a benefit of shooting in 1080i. I've done a small zoom test with some video. It seemed I could zoom in, maybe reframing up to 1/3rd closer, but not to a quarter size of the screen, which seems to be the resolution limit you'd be able to zoom into in theory. Unless you're going for a pixelated effect, you wouldn't want to over zoom.

(Hmm. . . I'm a little tired, woke up early. I almost feel like taking a nap before calling my friend's house. I think my friend has a newspaper deadline to meet, and he will probably be too busy with work to see me this early in the day.)

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