#9, Slow Time, More Music and Edits

Beach Lights, Pacific Coast, California, November '07, artistic view.

After Thanksgiving things became somewhat slower, not much is happening. Days are much shorter, at 5:00 pm the Sun is gone. There is little time to shoot videos outside, and I basically shoot all of my videos outside, at the beach or very close to the Pacific Ocean. This is were I live and this is where most of my videos usually come from, except when I go on a short vacation somewhere else and manage to take my most essential video equipment with me. Should I start to vlog? This crosses my mind from time to time, and usually I put it to rest for some time. I can write a blog in 5-10 minutes, but need 2-3 days to edit a video with more or less same information. So the blog wins for now as far as time saving goes.
I am editing two videos, and writing a music piece for the second one. Since I can seldom write something in less than a week, you see why I cannot release videos faster than one per week.
Hope you stick with this blog, and I promise to get better once I figure out how it really works. Do you like my pictures? Do you see the Moon in the picture above?

#8, Beach Time is Released

Sunset at Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, October '07, artistic view.

Just released my latest YouTube video Beach Time, a 2:56 HDV masterpiece shot on Oahu, Hawaii. When you drive around the Oahu island, either clockwise or counterclockwise, you will undoubtedly stop at several beaches, and other interesting places as well. When I stop, I go for a swim first, then spend some time doing nothing, and then pull my camera and start shooting whatever seems interesting at that time, no script, no preparation. Actually that is not exactly true, since before I leave the hotel, I usually look at the Oahu maps for good 20 minutes during breakfast trying to figure out which way to go for that day. Once I decide, and check if batteries are charged, and if there is at least one extra miniDV tape in my camera bag, then I go. A short drive and you are at the first beach. What do you do, do you shoot, do you swim, do you work on your suntan? Very tough choices, you must agree. After the first stop, you go to another place, and everything is more or less repeated. Pretty slowly, in no hurry whatsoever. There are plenty places to stop and look around, or grab a bite. Then the evening comes and the camera gives only grainy, noisy images, time to go back to your hotel. Tomorrow, another day very similar to today.
Have to say a word about the music. I wrote it, it took me almost a week. This time I decided to go for a simpler version with just a few instruments. Tried to keep it warm, just as I remember being there and shooting all those warm scenes. Hope you like it.

Listening to: Celine Dion's Taking Chances CD and watching her DVD in the evening.

#7, 1920x1080i HDV Pain

Bling, bling..., Waikiki, Hawaii, October '07, artistic view.

Tonight I spent several hours trying to transfer HDV files from a miniDV tape to Premiere Pro CS3, without much success. It looks like Adobe did not implement yet full support for the 1920 x 1080 interlaced HDV format. Amazing, iMovie could read those files without any problems for quite some time. An intermediate way which I tried, was to read first with iMovie, and then read files from iMovie into Premiere Pro. This works but the image quality is beginning to degrade. Can be used in an emergency only. We need to wait till Adobe addresses that issue in Premiere.

#6, More Music

Sunset on Oahu, Hawaii, October '07, artistic view.

More music writing last night and tonight. A piece that I got so far is quite good, but it tends to put me to sleep. Listened to it several times, and it happened, if I recall correctly, more than half of time! Not sure how well that is going to work with a mostly beach scene video. Or, maybe thinking about and spending too much time on music alone brings me to that sleepy mood.
Cut the video some more, will need a shorter music piece, which is good since I can release it a day or two sooner.

#5, Music for Beach Time

Two Coconut Trees, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii, October '07, artistic view.

I already mentioned that Beach Time will be my next video from Oahu, Hawaii. I still got some tape left with pretty good pieces, will look at those as soon as I am done with Beach Time. Edited some scenes a little bit tighter to match the video length with the music piece. Writing music, even if it is less than four minutes long, takes about a week. For comparison, I can shoot several hours of video during the same time frame. I always wondered how much time others spend on writing a piece that long. It is only instrumental, although there will be more than twenty instruments, and there is some orchestration work done to it, it is not just unison for all instruments. And a choir, of course. I am experimenting in that area quite a bit, since adding some human voice to an instrumental piece, improves it dramatically.
Added new subscriptions to my YouTube list today.
OK, time to close this one and go back to work.

#4, You Cannot Subscribe to Someone Who Blocked You

Two Torches, Waikiki, Hawaii, October '07, artistic view.

This subject is no longer relevant, therefore, the blog entry is deleted.

YouTube videos: youtube.com/Vatsek .
On twitter: twitter.com/Vatsek .
Flickr photos: flickr.com/photos/25951201@N07/ .

#3, Unsubscription Time

This blog entry has been removed as it became no longer relevant.

YouTube videos: youtube.com/Vatsek .
On twitter: twitter.com/Vatsek .
Flickr photos: flickr.com/photos/25951201@N07/ .

#2, Collaboration Video

5:00 PM Pacific Ocean Sunset, California, November '07, artistic view.

Just finished my first collaboration video with a YouTube member from abroad. I shot the video, and he is going to play a flute to come up with a nice background for it. Not sure how long it is going to take, we have to wait now. Actually, it was his idea, let us see how this works out. The video will be called Beach Birds. It comes from a small place near the Pacific Ocean; beach scenes, small and large birds, boats, green plants, dry tall grasses, and sunsets. In HDV 1920 x 1080 it looks pretty impressive, loses slightly when it is shrunk to fit the YouTube window. I am trying to figure out if there is any other encoding scheme that would produce much smaller number of artifacts when converted to YouTube flash format. Is spending another several hundred dollars on Adobe Flash software the only solution? Also we ran into issues with sending video files over 100MB in size, simple thing would appear, but gmail is choking on them, and so is Yahoo email. When going through YouTube, a conversion occurs, so you end up with a lower quality video at the start of collaboration. Very nasty!
But let us finish this blog on a more positive note. I am working on a music piece for my other Oahu video which I decided to call Beach Time. Just realized that both videos use a word beach in them, hope it is not too many times.
In the last two days, I listened to Alicia Keys' latest CD As I Am and watched Shakira's DVD Oral Fixation Tour. Both were bought on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com. A new book being read is Hearing and Writing Music, 2nd ed., by Ron Gorow. That one also came through Amazon.com.

#1, Well, It's Time to Start Blogging

California Seagull, Half Moon Bay, California, November '07, artistic view.

Well, it is indeed a good time to start blogging. I will be posting here updates on my YouTube video related activity. Since there is no good room to handle that on YouTube, other than making videos about it, which is quite time consuming, I believe this might be a better place to add comments about things that are happening around me in relation to video making. There will not be here much of my private life, this may not interest many of you. If you find my videos interesting, maybe you can stop by and read this blog, and respond or comment. How often do you expect to see new blogs? Let us see. I try to make my YouTube videos at a pace of roughly one per week, but sometimes this slips to one per two weeks, if I am busy and working on something else or traveling, for example. Since posting blogs is way faster than dealing with the videos, I hope to be at least twice as active with blogs than with my videos. Essentially twice a week, sounds about right. Or, maybe even more often! Will see how this works.