Hoping to get back to editing soon

I've been pretty busy and need to start looking at starting to edit the next video. I've been busy doing astronomy, going to a couple of concerts locally and involved with family medical issues and errands. Above you can see a photo I took of Gungor in concert locally. This is a 3d cross eyed photo. It was a very interesting concert. It's difficult to describe this group without describing the variety of styles they play. It's like a mix between contemporary Christian Praise music, a movie soundtrack from a modern movie, Rock, and all kinds of other influences. The music is excellent. Most of the songs at the concert were from their Creation Liturgy album. You never know what to expect. There is some short times in some pieces where a critical musician might feel that the songs or even the orchestration fall a little flat, almost going to a simple praise worship set, or perhaps the overuse of xylophones like percussion. But these are very few and brief, and the extra variety of music probably makes it more appealing, than less appealing. I heard a quote by someone who "attended 30 ooncerts" who said this was the best show they ever saw. (Perhaps they were young, as I've attended many more concerts. In rating the concert, for the shear variety and stage setup they get something extra. The light show was pretty good, matching a low budget Petra light show I've seen, pretty cool with the new LCD programmable lights what they can do at these events. The light show was awesome. I arrived a little late and missed part of the first song, so much to do. How would I rate this concert. It's difficult to say because I've been to a lot of great concerts. For a local concert at a hall, not compared with outdoor festival concerts, this has to be way up there in the ratings. I'd have to give it a rating of 9 out of 10. What would be "ten" as far as the pinnacle of Christian concerts. Well I'd say it's a concert that I haven't seen in a long time, I'm not talking a typical Petra concert, because this rates up there perhaps above that. It to me rates as good or as high or higher than the top level concerts I've seen, this would include Amy Grant and Michael W Smith, which have far more equipment and budget than Gungor. I can only recall one local (Metro detroit area) concert that I would rate higher and that would be The 2nd Chapter of Acts. I saw a concert of The 2nd Chapter of Acts, which was near the end of their touring career at U of M Dearborn. That concert was a definate ten out of ten and probably the best concert I've seen. That only slightly edges out the Gungor concert. Why? Well the Second Chapter of Acts created songs that were all praise worship hits, in their own right. They had harmonies and vocals that were unmatched by most and excellent band support with awesome synth lines. They lacked the variety of the Gungor concert however, even with the synths that they had. I believe the Second Chapter of Acts toured with a Fairlight synthesizer during the concert I saw at U of M and I'm really taken back by some of those patches and what they could add to a concert. Gungor is more evolved in some ways than the Second Chapter Of Acts. It's difficult to top Matthew Ward and his sisters or even approach their level of concert performance quality. Gungor actually is in some ways more evolved as they have more instrument variety and fuse different musical styles in a way that can likely keep everyone interested and at times guessing as to what will come next. How would I improve the group? I don't know if I could honestly say there is a way to improve much, because they are doing so much right and to move them in any one direction might not really improve them much. Some of the songs and song writing fall a little flat, but only in spots, they resemble some of the failures of modern praise and worship music, but only in small spots of some songs, not in a sustained fashion that would kill off even one song or cause me to drop it from the play list. There is so much positive with their approach and the way they blend the songs together I can't really think of a way I would approach and suggest a change. When you're hitting mostly home runs out of the ballpark, there is no need to change. The songs have a positive feel to them. They have enough variety to keep the most Attention Deficit Disordered fan, alert and attentive. I also like the way the songs build up and build up. I saw one song that the Farewell drifters sang that was not a typical structured song, but it had a "building and building" as if it was going to soar higher and higher, and it kept rising as the song developed. I really liked that Farewell drifters song. Gungor's songs all have a build up path, they tend to just keep soaring higher and higher. Could a show have songs that were more even and had more slow lower performance levels, giving the "highlights" more contrast. That might be one theoretical argument you could make against the show if you're splitting hairs looking for ways to improve their performance. But actually each song standing alone and having a nice steady buildup, seems very enjoyable, and I really wouldn't change that. I can remember MXPX having many short songs, built for radio play. They were all explosive. They could have tried to craft a song that was longer, but the energy they built in a concert, was sustained and it was really great to keep their shows moving forward. Gungor does the same thing really with their songs, they keep building and building. It's really difficult to put into words the effects of that concert. When I listen to their music it's very exciting. I only bought their Live album. I can't go to sleep listening to that album, it gets me moving and motivated. One evening after a late night astronomy session at the observatory I played the album to relax and go to sleep, it had the opposite effect. I was so inspired and motivated, I took the CD and laptop to the observatory to hook it up and do more observing. I ended up listening to the album over and over again while observing and looking up at the heavens, taking photographs of M42 and Jupiter much of the morning until sunrise. The observatory was my own private cathedral for observing during that time. The background of Gungor added to my observing session and kept me going. Most of the time we don't play music while observing, when others are there we don't want to change their experience of looking up and allow it to be a personal one, not one of a message or style of music being mixed with their observing impressions. But I was alone, so I had the music blaring up while looking up. At times I wondered if this would be the example of a pinnacle of music you might send out into space in a space probe. They sent an album on a space craft hurling out of the solar system, it had some kind of scientific greetings, and samples from the earth. If I was to send out a spacecraft right now, I'd probably prefer to send out the Gungor album to that. If you had a chance to send out a time capsule and say, this is what Christian praise music can be, a representation of the "best praise music to the creator". Gungor would fit the bill. . . . for an evolved music, that is current and represents many current trends of the last 100 years. The Gungor album pretty much says it all. I think I've written enough about this band. I really wish I could have shot a video of them and had the times, equipment and crew to throw together a concert video for them. That venue they were in in Canton was pretty good as well. My biggest criticism of the concert was, it was to short. . . left me wanting more. . .maybe I'll see them next time.

After a late night editing last night really enjoying tonight's concert in The Metro Detroit area.

Watching The 77s right now, it's awesome.

Check out the painted wall featuring artwork from their albums.




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Link to Jeff Summers video, one of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NQiMKVdW7U&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Link to one of Jeff Summers videos from Cornerstone.

I didn't put a link in the last post and a friend of mine said he could not locate the video on YouTube. His YouTube name is a little different from his name.

Having so much video per day, shows that he really worked at gathering a lot of video. Impressive.

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Went out to see Charlie Peacock last week in e Detroit area.

I'm editing the Violet Burning video just for my own fun. Have about fifteen minutes of the show done already. I sent them raw video unedited, and they should have the video by now.

I'm going to likely see The 77s in the Detroit area Sunday night. I almost wish I had my video stuff and crew ready to tape their local show. I haven't edited the video I shot of them at Cornerstone yet, there is a major technical problem with the video I shot the first night and I'm dreading even thinking about the post processing required to try to salvage that video. The first night at Cornerstone I only had two cameras plus handheld. But used a Stedicam for my main front camera, and that was a BIG MISTAKE.

I'm going to get the Violet Burning edit ripped out probably before the Concert Tomorrow night. It can be a rough edit as there may be an official better edit that they can do.

Then I have to decide which band to edit next.

I had an interesting request for video from a guy who taped a lot of Cstone 2012. I said I can't release video yet and have to ask permission before I release much. I looked at his video. He is producing a YouTube documentary which is his view of Cornerstone. It's actually very nice and I really want to get some of the video I shot to him so he can drop it in and improve his video later. I wish I had more bands edited together and was in a position to start asking for permission, but I have to be patient.

If you look up Jeff Summers on YouTube, you van find his documentary of Cornerstone 2012. It's really nice and it's the kind of Extra and wandering around footage I'd hope to get as video for a documentary. He did a really nice job. I had to focus on what I could do best which was try to get the best concert video I could with my limited resources. The heat and my age, prevented me from being able to go out and gather the kinds of video that Jeff gathered. That is the strange and wonderful thing about Cornerstone, it was so big there are so many variations of experience you could get at e festival, one could never experience more than ten percent of the festival in a year. It's one of the great things about that festival, hmm. . .hard to think about it in a past tense. It was great because of the variety of activities. I remember one year back before they moved it from Grays lake fairgrounds, when I saw a lot of seminars and fewer bands, that was a great thing about that festival, there was always something special that you could discover and new friends to meet.




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Stills show three main camera angles - Violet Burning video edit

Here's a brief account and look back at the video shoot of the Violet Burning at Cornerstone. I was running low on memory or power on all three main cameras by the time they were playing. When I import the video I usually refer to the cameras (from an audience point of view) as cameras 1, 2 and 3. Camera 1 is audience left near the front of the stage. The main camera. As you can see below. This was the Sony SR11 camcorder. I had a problem which was either battery but also possibly disk space related. I realized this and did something about it to extend this viewpoint as the camera started to die.

The second camera angle for this three camera shoot was the back middle camera. Here's a sample still from that angle. I zoomed in a bit for the Violet Burning. It gives a better view of the band but we lost the Cornerstone stage posters hanging that are on most of the rear camera angles for most of the bands I shot at the Gallery stage.

Camera 3 is up near the right side of the audience. It's (stage left) audience right.

Camera 1 was running out of space or battery. So I ended up pulling camera 3 off the tripod and walked up to the same position and shot that camera angle with the back camera. I would "lose" camera 2, the establishing shot, but I gained a better closer shot for the video. Had I more batteries and memory I might have not run into this limitation during that video shoot. The cost? A long life battery for these Sony Camcorders is about $100 and a 32 gig SIMM chip was about $100. So for another $200 invested in equipment I might have at least had a longer shot from one camera to cover the concert. (The wonders of hindsight.) The other thing I could have done, but this is just guessing in hindsight, was to save a camera and shoot with that after the others ones stopped working, had I known they would all start to run out of power 40 minutes before the concert was over. But I had blown past my expense budget already for the festival in getting the third camera and more SIM chips and batteries already. I had to put some kind of limit on my expenses. In the good old days, when I had greater income, I might try to power my way past the problem with more money. Actually I'm kind of amazed what I was able to do with the money I spent in such short notice. Having previous shooting experience helped. I spent about $380 on a Sony Camcorder, then on Thursday went out and bought another one. Then also I spent money on a Tascam DR40, that being about $180. I spent a little over $1000, maybe closer to $1200 on equipment. That added with the other stuff I had, the Sony SR11 camcorder, the iphone, Fujix 3d and the Canon EOS brought me up to six cameras. On the way back from Cornerstone I actually stopped at a Best Buy and hooked up my 3d Fujix camera to play back video I shot in 3d at the festival. If you look at the 3d video on a 3d TV, you will wish that you shot the entire event using 3d and had the capability to edit and produce a 3d blue ray disk. The 3d video is amazing. . . it's a completely different level. But unfortunately the 3d video camera, that Fujix shared the same problem that some other cheap cameras at the event had. The LED lighting for the concert created a major problem in the form of a weird lighting artifact streak that appeared with two lights behind the bands. This would not have happened with older types of lighting that take more power and throw off more heat. The LED lights have more features, but they ruin some video, 3d included. I tried to get extra footage with my iphone, but I think it was running out of power or memory so I stopped that recording. One of the nights, I don't know if it was during the Violet Burning or another band, the iphone died being low on power. I was recording at that time and had to wonder if that video would be written when the power died. The iphone tried to recover the video, but lost it. So the Iphone is not a good fail safe device to get video of an event on. It's an extra device that works sometimes, if the battery goes south while you are taping something, you might lose it. One thing I learned (to late) was that the SR11 would use power more efficiently if I closed the LCD side display. When it was fixed on the tripod and I was doing handheld, I could easily shut the side while it continued to film. The newer camcorders from Sony which are rather low end ($500 list) HD camcorders rely only on the side flip screen. There is no separate viewfinder and option to close the LCD screen. So these will burn more power, to power the side display. The main problem I had with the Sony SR11 up front was I was running out of memory and i didn't have spare SIM cards, required by that camera to extend the memory. I was recording to a 60 gig drive that had some other stuff on it. I kept deleting old stuff and backing it up to try to get more space as the Cornerstone event progressed. The best thing I could have done in preparation, would have been to do the following. Backup the entire iphone photo album and erase it, giving me much more free space. Have more batteries and more memory for the camcorders involved. I'm still amazed at how much stuff I was able to tape with a relatively low budget. In the old days one ADAT recorder (that I took to Cornerstone) cost me $4,000. I was taping Cornerstone 2012 with less than $4,000 worth of equipment and that got me up to six camera angles and a nice digital audio recording. That's a lot more bang for the buck than we used to get. Greg

Farewell drifters DVD done, kind of. . .

I have a final mix of the Farewell Drifters complete. Hmm. . . It looks pretty good. There are a couple things missing that could be added.

I didn't put closing credits in the first burn. Reviewed the DVD and it looks okay. I may throw credits on the end of a second DVD I send to them later, as soon as they respond with what they want on the credits.

There is another thing missing, something videographers often never tell a client or customer. We don't usually discuss what was left on the cutting room floor, the video we didn't use. In the case of the Farewell Drifters, and other bands from day four, I had some short video clips on my iPhone as well. These offer a different over saturated and somewhat posterized look. The nice thing about the iPhone clip, one nice thing is we actually see a little bit of the tambourine on the stage being played by the bass player. I didn't capture that with the other cameras. This isn't a really good close up or something and most of that footage is not to stable also, so it isn't a big loss. But I didn't even realize that video wasn't included in my edit process until the final cut was made. I realized I didn't transfer all my iPhone video to my computer, day 4 was missing. In reviewing the clips however, they probably wouldn't add much to the overall quality of the video. There is a chance I may revisit and edit this later and put a couple cutaways from that in, but it's not really necessary. Why editors, don't talk a lot about the stuff missed? People will never know if you don't mention it.

I'm starting to get video into the system for The Violet Burning. It's been a while since the shoot and I forgot the problems I had in shooting by now. The video from my main three cameras is in the nonlinear, and I saw the video from these and was surprised that there is only about an hour really fifty minutes of there set with my main cameras. The audio recording is much longer. I looked at one song with the Wayside, basically their first encore song and it was in the iPhone, but not totally there. Then I remembered I ran out of memory or battery with the iPhone so I had to stop that angle. Time to check the Canon EOS t1i. Well that video is only one clip as well, battery limits there as well, and possibly memory limits as well. What did I get with the Canon, an earlier part of the show. Okay as a last ditch effort, let's see what is on the Fujix 3d camera recording. I have an avi file which can be 3d or 2d from the Fujix. Looking at that there was an early song in that one song clip. So believe it or not I had six cameras recording The Violet Burning and missed the last forty minutes of the concert in spite of having six cameras. Of course I could always look for footage from others, but chances are I won't be able to get that and it's probably not very good as most just had a wide view from the back or did handheld and had shaky video. And I don't know how to get in touch with these anyway.

Also once you start getting into footage swapping, people start asking for a lot of stuff in return and I won't swap without permission from the artists. It's exciting to see The Violet Burning video I took, and I guess one positive is they played a lot of their new album at first, so there may be some useable material.

Now to kind of repeat other posts, how could this happen. Well it's simple really I didn't have a crew or any real support as far as power at the event, so I had no way to recharge batteries and my limited budget kept me from purchasing as many batteries as I needed to capture all of the bands. Had I recorded 1 hour less that night earlier I might have caught the entire set.

Being cooked by the 100F heat of each evening didn't help much either. Enough excuses. It's tine to start syncing up the Violet Burning clips I have and see what I can throw together.

The Violet Burning sells videos of one of their concerts. Maybe with a little luck they will be able to sell a few of these songs off the Internet and make a little profit off that Cornerstone concert. (I guess it depends on the quality we end up with and what they want to do.). As this is a gift to them, they would be able to make a few bucks without having to give me anything. It would be cool, and since one of their current projects is sent as QuickTime encodes, it might be doable. I guess it depends on whether they would find the quality high enough. We will see what happens.

I started looking at some of the videos posted under links from occupy cornerstone on Facebook. I was surprised to see a "show" someone put out, no doubt on the web, that had the entire Iona concert on it. It was shot with one camera from the front row. I guess one camera is better than nothing. I'm kind of shocked at someone putting out an entire concert. A sign of the times I guess. I don't want to put down that video much, because we all have to start somewhere.

If you want to see really good video of Iona, the best thing to do is search the web and buy the official video that they put out, because reviews state it's awesome.




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Some more progress on Farewell Drifter video

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I haven't been editing as much as I should and probably been watching to much Netflix during the past week or two. Actually was spending some time getting extra sleep due to the effects of a cold or allergies. I did a quick three camera edit of the Farewell Drifters. It was pretty rough. This was done while eating dinner, with the laptop in front of me. Later I reviewed and tightened up some of the edit points while adding in the front handheld camera shots. It's really surprising how nice the video is turning out without a lot of work doing much moving of the cutaways. When the front camera was added it added a lot to the "live mix". There is a bit of delay and stuttering with real time playback of the high resolution camera files inside Media 100. That isn't causing a problem with rendered output. I decided to render out to a large Quicktime master file, my version 3 edit of this concert. I figured I'd be able to review that and watch it casually and pick out any obvious edit changes I need to make. There were less "lighting effects" with this concert, meaning more fill white light on the band. This worked out better for the video and reduces my need to color correct the video. It may have a slightly more blue look but there is enough white light to make it acceptable. I get to deal with some family medical issues that are ongoing and can be a continued problem, kind of like dealing with long term cancer pain, or something like that, without going into details. This at times causes me to slow down my edit and productivity process as well. I was dealing with a "cold" and now other members of my family are experiencing the same symptoms. So the cold bug is moving around. This slows down progress on day to day activities and we end up letting things slide more. Haven't done really any Astronomy hobby stuff in the last week and very little video editing. It's really fun to watch this band play, it's difficult to imagine the amount of heat we had that night and during those days, now that Cornerstone is more distant and fall weather is causing cooler nights in the day to day life. It almost looks like the audience and band was having a good time. We were but the heat was intense and definately had it's effect. Other basic stuff with video, a kind of distraction happened. I was at a local astronomy event and a guy had a helicopter that took video. He may show up at the observatory and take some video of the observatory from an elevated view. Interesting flying video. While looking for a video light for that shoot I went through cases of old video tapes. I found some old public access cable shows I used to produce. This was a Christian Cable show featuring bands playing. Mostly music. I started digitizing some of those old shows from SVHS to the nonlinear. I'm playing them from an SVHS deck through a digital-8 camcorder, to convert the video to firewire, and had a problem with the audio making it through, possibly due to a wrong connector. So I recorded the audio from the shows separately into the TASCAM DR40 and brought the audio for each show into the Mac to resync it with the shows. I only have six shows on the hard drive right now. I may post these on youtube, but most of the bands were local Christian bands from this area. I have a little bit of old Cornerstone festival music on some of the shows, so I may post them on youtube. Right now the only show I have transferred is show #25 with Rez Band from 1992. The footage was very interesting to watch. It was the 20th anniversary show, and they were playing songs off their first album. There were three guys on the stage with large betacam cameras at that time (or something big) and they were filming a lot of the concert. Perhaps some of that footage was used in a better video than we shot but we had three cameras there in 1992 and taped that concert. It was interesting, and it's interesting to see Rez playing songs from their early days, and this from a concert 20 years ago. I showed a couple of young kids a bit of the Rez footage while at a local coffeehouse and asked them how old they were. Both of these "kids" were pretty young, one was 22 and the other less than 20. So they never saw Rez Band footage from 1992, those old days. . . hard to believe that the 1990's is considered old days now. . . how the years fly by. The quality of the sound is not as good as it was as I learned more about sound in later years, but it's still amazing to watch and remember. I might send copies of this show to JPUSA or links. I actually posted an "unlisted" version of that show on Youtube, but won't make it public yet. I'm working on other shows as well, that is recovering them as best as I can from those early tapes. It was interesting to see how much video I could throw together using switchers in the old days. Faster production, but with occasional flaws. It's much faster of course to shoot and do a live switch and then take some cuts from that recording and throw them into a show, than edit in a fancy "nonlinear" editing system. Nonlinear is slower, but of course allows us to get more precise video cutting. I'm hoping to get this forth video finished. And then perhaps move on to the Violet Burning. I'm not doing any of the first days bands until I'm finished with the rest of them, because I want to avoid "stedicam nightmare footage". Also I may be doing some of the other bands that are lesser known before editing The Choir footage, because I know I'm going to run into problems with that video.

Rendering out Media 100 Export of Farewell Drifter

The edit looks pretty good. What may be lacking a bit in the audio in parts of a couple of songs seems to be made up for with the overall quality. I rushed to Cornerstone to do the shoot. I didn't plan for it enough. One of the problems with my approach, which was going the last minute was I didn't gather enough equipment to actually do the shoot without a few possible problems. For example I used to use AKG C1000s microphones for audio recording. I know they aren't high end audio recording microphones, but they are good enough for most live performance recordings. Why? Well the specs tell the story. The C1000s microphones have a very transparent quality to them and are condenser microphones. Condensers are better than dynamic microphones in recording high frequencies, but often have a problem which is they cannot handle extremely high noise volumes. The C1000s microphones are not just condenser mics but also designed to handle very high DB sound levels. They are often used as drum microphones above in live concerts covering the cymbals. I usually use C1000s microphones, or I should say I used to use them. I had the C1000s microphones locked away in storage, basically buried in the back somewhere in a case with other audio equipment. I had and often used windscreens for them. The cases were buried under so much other stuff, that I couldn't locate the microphones during my last minute planning. I remember seeing them when rearranging my massive storage space, but didn't apparently put that "case" in the front of other cases, but buried it. I had hoped to tape the Cornerstone event with these microphones and always used the windscreens. I picked up a digital recorder, and it had built in microphones. The Tascam Dr40 wasn't available locally close to my house. So I ended up locating and picking up one on the road. Unfortunately, they didn't have wind screens on the microphones. I figured I might be able to take my windscreen from my Sony Condensor microphone that is on my camcorder and use that. When I was under the Gallery tent under the hot conditions it seemed that there was no wind to speak of. I forgot to try to put the wind screen over the Tascam recorder and left it on my camcorder. The recorder didn't seem to pick up any wind when I reviewed the recordings each night, but obviously I didn't review all the recordings while the event was happening. It seemed the placement of the Tascam would keep any wind pretty much away, although they were up high, there was a lot of tent covering the event and a lot of people inside. I almost bought a Zoom Windscreen kit as well when looking for the Tascam, but didn't at a closer store. So the Tascam microphones were not covered or protected from the wind. With most of the recordings I didn't have a problem, but with the Farewell drifters, I noticed some wind noise on a couple of the early songs, near the end of one of them. And also I noticed a bit of other noise which the wind screens would not have reduced later during some quite tunes. This other noise was sound from another tent or act further away, but obviously loud enough. These distractions reduced the quality of the recording a bit. Other than that the sound is pretty good and I still enjoy watching this video. The initial edit was pretty good and a few minor adjustments were added. I only have a few "soft cut" transitions that were added to reduce the harse cutting effect of a couple of "takes" and I added one "push" DVE (digital video effect) which is pretty quick. Now I'm exporting out the program to a master quicktime file. This step takes about 20 hours or so. And the early estimates were 12 hours by the Media 100 system. I'm using "multiple pass" encoding and also had to make sure the Macintosh hard drive had plenty of free space for temporary working files. If I have about 30 gigs free that's normally enough. It's interesting to leave the computer running and then look at it the next day. After nearly 12 hours the time estimates actually go up, this is due to a lag in the multiple step encoding. The status bar seems to be moving very slowely or stalled, but this is just because the process takes so long. The estimates will continue to grow until the first pass is complete, then all of a sudden the last part of the process will start to fly and take maybe 4 or 5 hours. But at this moment it looks like the render is stalled. I actually went out and purchased some Violet Burning stuff off the web. I found some old link and sent in an order and found out that the link I used was some old link from Google to a past ordering method. The price was something like $12 for a DVD and almost immediately after ordering I received a reply from The Violet Burning that this was an obsolete link and an old price that I found. They send me a prompt refund (through paypal as I was using that). And they sent me a better link. So I ordered a couple of their products. Then I found out the video was a digital download. Cool. So I get an email with the digital link in it and download a "CD/MP3" purchase first, no problem. Then I tried to download the video. It's 1.7 gigs in size. My home WIFI is pretty slow and it would take 4 or 5 hours for the download to work, so I went to a pizza place that has wifi and used to have very fast wifi. That is located in Dearborn Michigan. But their wifi is broken, yet another fairly fast wifi was working (Open Dearborn). So I started to download the video at about 1 meg per second speeds. While eating the first download failed. In Firefox on my Macintosh. So I tried it again. I spent a hour or two there and all downloads failed. So I figured I'd try it again but this time at a different location. Maybe the service or my Macintosh was to blame. I'm running an old and early version of Snow Leopard, so I don't have the most recent OS or even the highest upgraded version of Snow Leopard. I tried downloading it at a Starbucks closer to home, but that took a much longer time, a slower WIFI connection. The download was going to take 3 hours. About 90 minutes through the download the program says my download is complete, but of course it will only download part of the zip file. So I have a 1.2 gig, a 1.02 gig and something like a 700 gig download. Of course a partial zip file won't work. So I'm "saving money I guess and hassle" by getting the video digitally. I decided to try downloading it on my cheap Windows 7 laptop which I use for astronomy. A newer OS and I have Chrome installed on it. Chrome is one of the recommended browsers listed in the email from the Violet Burning (Mike). So I ended up going to another place with WIFI, Buffalo Wild Wings. The WIFI seems slower than Buddy's Pizza (open Dearborn) in Dearborn, but actually the download was much speedier. I was downloading at 1.6 megs per second (according to Chrome) but actually it was probably faster. Within 30 or 40 minutes the download was completed and I had The Violet Burning video ZIP on my hard drive. I fired up the video. It was pretty cool. I kind of wished they had more video angles in the video, but obviously they shot it with a limited budget or limited access to the environment, keeping cameras stuck at a few angles. It looks like they shot it with pretty nice cameras, but these were industrial cameras or some kind of large cameras, without image stabilization. It looks like the video was shot handheld. Some of the video moves and shakes a bit. It kind of gives it an artistic feel. The video has a bit of a homemade quality to it. It's kind of cool what they did with the coloring of the video, there is a kind of almost bleach bypass/sepia tone that is on the video, with a hint of violet color actually. It's pretty cool. Some of the cuts of that video look to be from a wide to a narrower angle inside the same shot, digitally cropped. It looks like they cut to the same camera angle. I thought for a while that they only had one camera at that shoot. I still like the video. I know it sounds like I'm critical, but it's pretty cool. It looks like it was filmed in an Orthodox church, with some items that were not moved at all, a candle holder, etc that probably could not be moved. I've actually shot videos in some churches where the camera operators were told we cannot be in certain areas of the church and must stay within a certain boundary. For example you can't go on stage in some churches with the camera. It's like your treading on holy ground, only meant for the ministers or those in the ceremony. I can remember having those limits at one church where I did a wedding, but they let us go up into the organ loft above and behind the stage. We had a camera at that wedding shooting out from the organ above and behind the stage. It looked like the Violet Burning video had those kinds of limitations on it. But I still liked it because you get a feel of the concert. I also liked the way that video sounded. It was recorded with "a few microphones" in the room, to get a live feel. It has a very "wet" live feel to it. Which is something I really like. I can tell they had a few microphones in there. Giving both the feel of the space and a clear audio track. Some video recordings that are live have a dry sterile sound, because they have so much of the "mixing board" direct sound in the mix. Other recordings, which are more like bootlegs or are bootlegs have a sound which is live, from a camera. Many times camcorders don't get enough direct sound and suffer from being to much "live sound" and are missing aspects of the event that we hear. I like the "live sound" in the Violet burning video. I think it's actually a pretty nice video. It's not as cookie cutter as some of the "produced videos" we see from the more expensive productions. The sound may be less sterile than some really expensive productions, but I like it and find it refreshing compared to the typical professionally produced video. I myself strive to have a bit of both in a video recording if possible. This comes from having a good feed from the board and also good microphones in the room. I tend to put more microphones and room sound in the recording than others might, giving it a more live sound. With the cornerstone videos from 2012 that I shot, I didn't have the luxury of planning ahead of time and wasn't permitted to get a "live feed" from the boards. There is a chance that someone (the sound guys) recorded the board feed (at least for some of the performances). That recording might have been for some other projects or perhaps just for their personal review. I'm not sure how many groups they may have recorded, or if they were just saying that to put me off. My recordings from other main stage performances at Cornerstone actually had better sound, because I had a board feed and microphones. The Tascam recorder did a good job however. it's offering a pretty good recording and there is little need for adjustments in the mixing afterwards. There's only so much you can expect. I'm hoping to really surprise the Violet Burning with the video I send them. I hope that I have something good enough that they may choose to release it. It would be nice to see that out there so people could actually download that video off their website and they might get some profit off that appearance. Ironically that may be a way that they can get a little money, from the video I send them. It looks like they have a way to digitally deliver product. I guess we'll see what happens. I'm hoping that all goes well with this export and that I can start working on the Violet Burning video next. Below is a sample screen shot of the export time estimate. I gotta post this now, because I need to get out of this browser and make sure this computer has all it's resources being used by the export.