Video?!

I'm just experimenting with the idea of a video blog right now. 

Yes, I have a face for radio!

The "project" started this morning when I booted up my machine and clicked off the irritating "you have unused icons on your desktop" balloon.  Then I took a good look at my desktop and noticed a shortcut to Vidcap32.  Not really knowing what it was for (and having recently deleted some bloatware off of my hard drive) I opened it up to see.  It was using my Playstation EyeToy for the video capture device (I put modified drivers on my PC to accommodate it) and the capture quality was okay, but every time I adjusted the settings or tried to modify the video it would either crash or drop 75% of the frames. 

That's when I remembered that I had an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5.  I didn't really expect it to capture live video, but it did it well.  All right, it did it tolerably for the clunky old machine that my PC is, but the point is it was watchable.  The still graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator and then rasterized in Photoshop.  The file size for a 320 x 240 video seems a bit large, so I'll have to figure out how to change those settings in the future.

Learning is a time-consuming process.  Five hours of work = one minute of video.  This was mostly due to the fact that I trained on Premiere CS in school but the money just wasn't there for a new or even reasonably priced copy.  The fundamental differences are few, but the interface is just different enough to cause confusion.  In fairness, it did take me a couple of minutes to sketch that "Technical Difficulties" screen graphic.  It also seems to be taking over an hour to upload the damn thing, though it is 310 mb on my hard drive and our DSL connection here could be properly referred  to as "quaint."  It doesn't help that there is apparently no progress bar in either my browser or on Blogger for uploads.

Man, this upload is taking a really long time...

If this works I'll see about making more (and more interesting) videos.

UPDATE: I've been trying to encode it smaller all day, just to make the upload speed a bit less cumbersome, but Premiere 6.5 has been crashing every time I try to trim it.  Yeah.  Turns out that it was the audio compression that was making it freak out, and now that I know what to do it I can make the videos less than 1/6th their original size. 

Technology can be hard to deal with!