Behind The Scenes

So that movie from yesterday took a good while to make. It was almost an hour of footage from the handycam, which means it was about 10 Gig of raw data. So when you loaded all that into Movie Maker, the computer had lots of problems (especially since after storing that movie I only had about 10 Gig free on my hard drive). So the first thing I ended up doing was breaking the movie up and saving smaller pieces of it. Once saved as mini movies these pieces were compressed and smaller so the computer didn't thrash memory as much when manipulating them. Then I had to load those pieces back into Movie Maker and start working with the smaller pieces. Once I applied the speed up, the Movie Maker simply could not render a preview of the final product since it was skipping around within the data file too much (the music would play fine, but one frame would be displayed for half a minute instead of seeing multiple frames a second). So the only way I had to preview the movie was to save it to disk. This required a lot of time (about 15 minutes) since I assume it has to redo the algorithm for differences between each frame now that by doubling the speed four times it needed to determine the difference between each frame and the frame 16 spots away. And I suspect that after seeing the finished product there were about four times where I went back and tweaked something during that process, like on the first pass where I didn't mute the audio from the video and you could hear everyone sounding like chipmunks (so all in all I ended up making a version of the movie four times at fifteen minutes each). As for why Noodle and Brick are in there, I only decided to throw them in at the end because once it was all said and done the music was running much longer than the video (and yes, I realize the ending part is kind of slow because of that, which explains why some people may not have even seen Noodle and Brick).

And on an unrelated topic, I see that Blogger 2.0 is pushing full steam with their not so subtle prompts to try and get me to upgrade. Previously they had left me alone because I was part of the Strangers team blog, and since team blogs previously weren't upgradable, members of them were prohibited from upgrading also. But now it looks as if Strangers has transitioned to Blogger 2.0, so for the time being I can't post to Strangers anymore until I upgrade (which is fine since I don't have anything to post at the moment anyway).