My video editing project kind of ground to a halt over the holidays.

There was a lot of activity and some of this related to astronom which slowed down my edit process. Much of this was related to my not having a budget for more hard drives and my unwillingness to delete some of the older projects that has been delaying my editing.

There were other distractions. Most notably a DVD ripping project to inventory and rip DVDs we already own for my moms kiosk setup. This involved HTML encoding of a custom web page as well. This took quite a bit of time as we had about 400 DVDs many from laserdiscs copies we own that were put on the kiosk which is a Macintosh computer.

After the kiosk was setup for my mothers iPad mini which was a little Christmas gift, I decided to get serious about having w backup for the 900 movies we had for her kiosk. This meant getting a drive that I could use as a backup and boot drive as well. I wanted a backup boot drive that stored all the movies and would allow me to use it as a carbon copy boot drive. This took some time to setup as well.

I was ripping movies late at night. There was other issues, she kind of rejected the iPad web page thing after about three weeks worth of work getting the thing setup. It's a good list concept where a list a web page shows all hr movie names. Well my mother has an iPhone as well and I set that up for her for Netflix and a couple of stored movies. These are what she uses a lot. Netflix wasn't working. She had an old iOS and Netflix the old app was broken and wouldn't work or get updated. In any event, I decided to upgrade her phone to iOS version 6 and see if that would allow her to have Netflix. That update took five hours with various backups, one being a backup before I started the upgrade process. Then I signed in to my apple identification for her phone. After a few restarts I started playing around with her movies and realized that the newer iTunes which I also loaded on my laptop was showing movie sharing over the home wireless network. Hmm that library looks like it would include anything I'd have on e kiosk if I relinked the movies from a kiosk drive through my laptop.

I spent about an hour doing that and all the movies about 930 show up on her phone and on her iPad mini. She seemed more receptive of this interface and the visual representation of the movies, with thumbnails than my info page kiosk setup.

In any event she seems to enjoy the new setup and can stream the audio through apple tv as well but not video and audio. So she can get the large speaker sound from the living room setup but have the movie display on her iPad mini.

In any event, with all these late night jet lag like renders and astronomy, ive delayed editing and setting aside time for more cornerstone videos. I have to start on that again. I even realized that I forgot a Trace Bundy concert that was going to happen last November? Or was it early December in Detroit? I really wanted to see him again in a local venue which would have been cool. But it's a small venue and lily was sold out anyway. Kind of bummed and shocked I forgot about the concert and also a bit surprised how fast the time flew by. These iOS devices and wild movie kiosk projects can sure take a ton of time and the time can fly by.

All in all iOS 6 looks to be pretty cool on her iPhone 4 but no Siri assistance and voice controls. The biggest hassle with iOS 6 is they changed the phone dialed button colors to white with outlines on white, which is stupid and something we can't change. There is a fix which is reverse colors in accessibility, bit at reverses everything and makes pictures and backgrounds look like they are negatives. Looks like apple is making some goofy mistakes in some of these updates and not realizing the users need better interface options, especially for the elderly. I could increase default fonts foe her, but I doubt that would help. Maybe I need to buy a phone diaper program for her now to solve the keypad problem.

I hate to complain about apple in this blog post, but it's just a short subject for the day. Maybe the newer iPhones would have this solved or an iOS patch will fix this in the future.

In any event it's about time to start up on editing again. I've been going at it much slower mostly because I haven't spent the time to cull and setup née drive space. That's the bottom line.

Also my winter activities have been cut back a bit due to the weather and some health issues at the house. Time to cut short this post as I'm about to eat dinner and much of this stuff is off topic. This is likely mostly a diary entry, there is little or no interest in this blog anyway.

Greg



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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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