Dam Dam DAM (in Kinzua, that is)

Local residents know the Kinzua Dam, located about six miles south of Warren, Pennsylvania. One weekend in early March of 2015 I realized that I had never been there in the winter, so I took my camera out to rectify that. The snow was quite high despite being sunny (still not very warm), and here's some footage.


It was windy, and I didn't have an audio recorder with a windscreen with me, so I apologize about the sound.

CJ's Home Decor & Fireplaces How-To Videos, Episode 1: Measuring for a Zero Clearance Fireplace Door

What a week that was...

This is the first in a series of instructional videos that I'm working on for my employer. It's been an interesting experience. Here's a basic rundown on everything that I did to produce it:

1. Wrote a script for the procedures (with input from my boss)
2. Gathered up the tools and incidentals
3. Shot the footage with a single camera
4. Recorded audio
5. Edited footage in Adobe Premiere
6. Color-matched footage in Adobe Speedgrade
7. Cleaned up audio in Adobe Audition
8. Created 2D art assets in Adobe Illustrator & Adobe Photoshop
9. Made 2D animations in Adobe After Effects
10. Modeled and rendered 3D animation and particle systems in Blender
11. Selected and arranged the music tracks
12. Rendered the video
13. Uploaded it to YouTube
14. Closed caption editing

I did all of this within a five-day period. Did I do a good job? I'll let you be the judge. Are there things that I would change/improve? Well certainly - good art is never finished, only abandoned. But the important thing is that I've learned a lot while doing it!

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!