#23, Three New Videos

Time To Get Up, Santa Clara, California, April ‘08, artistic view.

Yes, I know. I did not write anything for a while, and my goal of writing at least twice a week goes up in smoke. And the goal of submitting a video per week is also unrealistic. I spend quite a bit of time shooting, about a day with preparations, travel, finding something interesting and shooting on location. It is good that in the Bay Area everything is not too far away, usually within 1-2 hours of driving. Editing, as you well know, can be pretty slow depending on your approach. I have, depending on the video length, 30-50 clips to edit. Every single one is tweaked till it looks good and makes sense, and is not out of line with the major theme for that part of video. Still using iMovie, but it is obvious and almost mandatory to switch to something better, simply because many other people on YouTube already switched to much more advanced, and expensive, video editing software. Those with iMovies are simply going to fall behind. Actually I was thinking a bit about the future on YouTube, and since good videos are expensive to make, and require fairly expensive equipment, there is probably not much room for people with small budgets, and cameras built into their laptops. Sad but true. The higher video quality, HD especially, is going to be expensive and not viable to many people making videos today. Do you agree with me?
My last three videos come from Monterey, Santa Cruz, and Mt. Hamilton near San Jose, CA. They look quite good, I believe. I seem to like recording natural sounds more and more, even very basic sounds, ocean, passing cars, and splashed water. The stereo mike I am using is picking up lots of sounds from different direction, even me breathing - not necessarily what I want. A good stereo shotgun will be tried very soon, maybe even on the next video.
Composing music is something I am enjoying more and more and plenty of music books are scattered around my place for easy reference. Today I was listening to the score from Serenity by David Newman. Also today started to read Gabriel Yared's The English Patient by Heather Laing, ISBN-10: 0-8108-5910-6, which is a film score guide. Let me say the Hollywod Studio Symphony sounds good!

PS. First year on YouTube summary as promised - tomorrow.