OT: Here's the intro shot of my 3 1/2 hour DVD

riredale wrote on 4/5/2004, 3:30 PM
Okay, I've put on the body armor. You can go over to Chienwork's web site and download the first 3:36 of my DVD project from last summer. I toured Germany, Czech Republic, and Austria with a pretty good high school choir for nearly two weeks, and brought back nearly 60 hours of raw video.

The whole project runs about 3 1/2 hours of DVD on two disks, and includes a commentary track and an hour's worth of "Bonus features."

I will be going on a similar trip this coming summer, this time with a choir a few years younger. I will be using my new VX-2000 (rather than the old TRV8) and will be recording in surround sound. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

This is my first upload in the wmv format. I tried a custom setting, so the video should be pretty clean, but it runs at about 500Kb/sec, which is probably way too much for streaming. Right-click on the download button (second page) and save instead. It's listed as "riredale-Europe By Song intro." The whole file is about 13MB.

Comments

farss wrote on 4/5/2004, 8:45 PM
It's great.

I'd try to do bit more on the audio side, sounded a bit too 'live' to me.
If (BIG IF) you've got the money I think it's Neuman who make a very nice stereo shotgun or look into an X-Y mic, Rode make a nice matched stereo pair for not too many $$$. Placement is the key of course and you don't want to get too much in the audiences way.
I knwo wehn your travelling the last thing you want is a big kit of gear so with one or the other of thise two types of mics you should be able to get some excellent results.

5.1 would really make it something but micing that could be real tricky. You can get a single mic that handles the 5.1 but me thinks it's way up there in price. What'd be really neat is to record dry and use acoustic mirror then you have full control.

Just some thoughts, maybe overkill though.
riredale wrote on 4/5/2004, 9:45 PM
Thanks.

The intro clip audio was literally just the raw audio from the built-in TRV8 camcorder. As I mentioned, I added the bird audio in Vegas from wav files I found on the Internet. The "Train" song audio (during the DVD menu) was from a separate inexpensive Sony stereo mic sitting on its own tripod a few feet forward of the camcorder, which for that performance was on the centerline of that same little church. So the mic was a good 50' away from the choir for that song.

If anyone is interested, I'll post another clip from that DVD. It shows a song shot from three camera angles. I got frustrated trying to figure out which cut to put where, so I just threw my hands up and put all three on-screen. Had an interesting effect.

Thanks again for the comments. I had second thoughts about "exposing" myself (figuratively speaking) to the forum after working on something for a long time. I guess that's a natural reaction.
JackW wrote on 4/5/2004, 10:38 PM
No nead for the body armor! It's a really nice piece of work. Once I downloaded it I ran it full screen in WMP and it held up very well, even at that size.

The move into the church, coordinated with the conductor's move down the aisle, is very effective. Hope you'll let us see more as you work on it. Thanks for sharing this bit.

Jack
Jay Gladwell wrote on 4/6/2004, 5:24 AM
Richard, that was very nicely done! I especially liked your opening shot--very, very well done, indeed.

Yes, I would like to see more from the DVD, by all means.

J--
craftech wrote on 4/6/2004, 7:19 AM
Rich,

I can only get the audio, not the video. I am using WMP 7.01.

John
riredale wrote on 4/6/2004, 8:13 AM
Craftech:

I don't know why, only to mention that I encoded it in wmv9. Perhaps your player needs to download the latest decoder? Maybe someone else will know.

Everyone:

Thank you again for your comments. I will put another slice up on Chienwork's site a bit later today. Do you guys want a pretty good song, or a clever "pedestrian-hitting-a-signpost" trick?
danstine wrote on 4/6/2004, 4:50 PM
WMP 7 actually automatically supports wma 9 audio codecs, but not wmv 9 video codecs. If you don't want to install the latest version of WMP (9), you can set your media player to automatically download needed codecs. We tested this on an older box we had not yet upgraded and it wasn't too bad. Go into WMP, Tools, Options, Player, and make sure you have checked the option download codecs automatically. WMP9 is actually not too bad, for MS. And, it will even play DVDs for you! Much better, I might say, than the popular low-cost brand that came with our DVD burner.

Dianne
craftech wrote on 4/6/2004, 5:31 PM
Thanks for the tip Diane. For many reasons including security reasons I haven't downloaded and installed WMP 9, but I'll try the automatic codec update.

In terms of playing DVD's, I have a hardware decoder card which is just like using a set top player on my computer. Cost only $40 and works great with no CPU load.

John

Follow up: I checked and that option was checked all along. I guess I would need the full install to see the videos using WMP 9 codecs. Guess I'll pass Rich although I would really love to see your intro. Sounds great though!
danstine wrote on 4/6/2004, 5:45 PM
His video short is way too good to miss, and besides, think about all the other wmv 9 experiences you may be missing ;)

A few more options for you ...
1) download and install the codecs yourself ... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/codecdownload.aspx
2) you mentioned security, is it possible that you have a registry setting to disable automatic codec downloads? If you're comfortable with regedit, it's the DWORD value PreventCodecDownload with 1 being true to disable, or 0 being allow downloads.

Dianne
danstine wrote on 4/6/2004, 6:03 PM
What a great clip! I understand why people don't want to pick a menu option!

As long as folks that are connecting with a high speed connection, ie. greater than the 500K you've encoded with, the kbps, nor the file size is the problem with viewing over the internet. What you want to do, is to use 2 pass CBR encoding, or 1 pass CBR encoding; rather than the VBR encoding. Only CBR encoding allows for progressive download, in this case HTTP streaming.

If you want to see an example, well, you wouldn't probably want to watch the whole thing, it's a 12.28 minute 28.4MB video of my husbands guitar club from work. It too is encoded with wmv 9 codecs , but on my DSL connection, it starts playing about 4% or so into the download. It's at: http://mysite.verizon.net/res0msme/video/BBJam.htm

And speaking of taping music events (though my husbands group could perhaps be motivated to practive more by listening to your youth group!), care to share about the inexpensive sony mic? I've been looking at one that's a hair under $100 at Guitar Center, that is a single mic with stereo input, and it will connect to my camcorder. What I can't figure out how to do is to get it further away from me, cause the attached cable is only a few feet, nor did it seem obvious to me how to attach it to a tripod. My husband keeps telling me not to worry about it, because he has all this digital sound equipment stuff, but his stuff isn't too portable, and he never wants to get it out when we have the gang over. So, I'm interested in hearing about what you're using, and how you've got it rigged.

Dianne
riredale wrote on 4/6/2004, 9:09 PM
Dianne:

The mic I used for the "Train" audio is the little Sony MS-908C, which sells for about $70 on the Internet. It sounds reasonably wide and flat. It will never be mistaken for a $1,000 studio microphone when it comes to noise level, though, but for my "documentary" purposes it's great (everything I do is "live", and the ambient background noise level is high enough to effectively mask the mic's noise).

You can select either a 90 or 120-degree stereo pattern. I almost always use the 90. There is also a bigger brother to the 908C, called the MS-957, which apparently has a much lower noise floor. It sells on eBay typically for $175.

This mic uses a miniplug rather than the more professional XLR connector. I have used it while running through 40' of extension cable, and can't hear any difference, though the XLR cabling is supposed to be much more noise-resistant.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the first song on the intro clip was recorded using the built-in microphone on the little TRV8, a 5-year-old Sony miniDV camera. The Sony engineers must have used notch filters or something, because there is very little drum noise with this camera.

People on this board probably have many suggestions about other microphones that might, in fact, be far better than the 908C. I will, however, be using two of them this summer when I do my next documentary in surround-sound: one pointed forward, and the other mounted aft and angled upwards about 30 degrees. The aft-facing one will be feeding a Minidisc recorder velcroed to the back of the VX-2000 battery.
Hunter wrote on 4/7/2004, 2:45 PM
Two questions, how was the camera being held for the opening shot - the walk in ( very nice ). 2nd lets see the bonus tracks .....LOL
Cheesehole wrote on 4/8/2004, 4:08 AM
>>> I guess I would need the full install to see the videos using WMP 9 codecs.

You can just download the codec package from MS without installing the WM9 player:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/codecdownload.aspx


[oops - that's what I get for not reading the whole thread. Dianne beat me to the punch!]
gold wrote on 4/8/2004, 7:39 AM
Very impressive. You have an option of play movie with commentary. To the best of my knowledge DVD-A can't do that; I've had to use Adobe Encore to get multiple audio tracks and add commentary as an option. Did you put the video on there twice to accomplish this or use another package for the audio? I'd like to see more of this video; have you posted more elsewhere.
Excellent work.
riredale wrote on 4/10/2004, 9:16 PM
Hunter and Gold:

I uploaded three more clips from this project here.

The authoring was done on a different program called Maestro, but from what I have heard, the next version of DVD-A will have multiple audio program capability too.

Hope you enjoy the clips.