Duely Noted

I wasn't intending for such a long gap between posts but I've been extremely busy.  I'm pretty sure everyone will get to see just how busy after I post the next few articles, there's plenty more to come after this one! 


So the long awaited day came and passed by in a blurry haze of celebrities, martial arts demonstrations, and LOUD speakers (literally).  I got Troy a pass to attend the event with me in Los Gatos where I was to present the video and slide work I had spent the last couple months designing and prepping.

Let me back the progress train up here and start from the beginning.  After getting offered the job back at the end of February to build video reel clips which turned into a whole presentation package for the celebrities that would be attending the event, there was a long process of locating the video resources (dvd, bluray, internet demo reels, etc.) that I would need to build the reels with.  Each reel had to be exactly 1 minute in length with audio. 

This was probably the longest and most time consuming portion of the editing as it was a lot of waiting while DVD's came in the mail, ordered online, or borrowed from friends.  Then even more waiting as I had to use decrypting software (DVDFab) to copy the movie content onto the computer
and then start another lengthy process of trans-coding the videos into a video file that my NLE could edit.




After spending a few hours sifting through the movie files finding locations to extract footage out of for the particular celebrity, it was actually fairly easy to build the reels.  The next portion of the work happened towards the last couple weeks when things really started to pick up.

I had to hunt down a decent presentation software that could handle playing video and images on a secondary screen without showing buttons a cursor or desktop or anything; in other words - an actual presentation  (which is funny considering the amount of difficulty it is to get PowerPoint to do anything of the sort).

Screenshot courtesy of MediaComplete

I managed to find a program by the name of MediaShout.  While primarily marketed (and even developed) toward church and religious functions - as they have lyrics and even bible contents that comes with the program install, the program is actually pretty decent at handling video files.  I installed the demo on my main workstation which has a 2nd screen attached: a 46" HDTV through HDMI.  I built up the presentation on the workstation and would install the demo a week before the event to test it out on that machine.  However just a week before the event I barely got this software setup on the laptop I would be presenting it on.

As the main day approached I also finished designing all the still slides for all those attending as I went back and forth with the client getting updated on who is attending, who's dropping out, and the final order of those being called on stage.

The next step I ended up spending an entire day on.  I had just moved the presentation and all the associated files over to the laptop and began to test it out on a large screen HDTV in another room via the VGA connection.

The first issue I noticed was that when you open up a presentation with no actual script saved all of your media is sorted in numerical/alphabetical order automatically.   I tried several times to save it with the arrangement I put the slides in but every time upon opening it it would automatically arrange them how it wanted to.  My remedy was to rename the files and rebuild the presentation so that every slide (still and video reel) was numbered accordingly.

Secondly, once I got to the first video reel in the presentation, I noticed terrible tearing from a vertical sync issue.  To test this I simply opened up the video file in Windows media player and played it on both the laptop screen and the external display and there was no tearing.  So this apparently is an issue with video playback of MP4 files from within Mediashout 4.5.  

Further frustration ensued at the end of the video reel.  I set automatic transitions to happen when the videos finished playing, to transition to the next slide (a still of the same celebrity).  I would get flawless playback and transitions on my workstation, but on the laptop when the video reel finished it would immediately hang.  The only way to force it to respond (windows still running okay), was to CTRL+ALT+DEL and launch task manager, which caused the screen and program to refresh and it would then glitch straight to the next slide. 

I only have that problem trying to run the presentation software on the laptop and I spent all day the day before the even trying to figure out the source of the problem (which included making sure every other task, process, and service that didn't need to be running, was indeed not running).

My solution regarded working around the known issue I encountered by building an extra 5 seconds at the end of the clips, leaving my fade-out times in-tact in my NLE and just having them run into blank empty video for 5 seconds. I edited all 11 video reel sequences and re-rendered them all out, and then proceeded to re-import and build the presentation again with the proper video reels.  This time I would tell it to automatically transition from the video at a set time: 61 seconds (giving 1 second blank to transition to the slide after).

This still did not solve the problem, still resulted in freezing and hanging before it could transition to the slide.  I tried manually re-timing the slides to 59 seconds and some odd milliseconds, which ended up cutting into the fade-outs I had built into the reels.  THIS finally solved the problem and left me no time to try and see if I could re-do the fade-outs so that I wasn't cutting off the video and audio abruptly.

In the end the event still went smoothly and no one was the wiser as seeing the video reels on a giant projection screen and hearing the audio over a really nice loudspeaker system which was run by DJ Curt turned out really well.

I can only imagine what I had to deal with was but a slight mental discomfort compared to the massive efforts Andrew Fanelli of All-Pro Tae Kwon Do went through to not only put the entire event together, but to get all the celebrities to attend, have all the awards built and designed, get press coverage, news coverage, and video production to film the event.  On top of that Andrew also hosted the event and had special arrangements for a private dinner for all the VIP's after the event as well.  Celebrities even had stations set up for autographs and pictures for all the audience that attended.

The video production will be making a special DVD of the event to sell  later and commemorate the once in a lifetime opportunity to see all these long time martial arts legends together in the same building!  Congratulations Andrew and a job extremely well done!

Andrew Fanelli

So many projects I've done in the last couple weeks. I'll try to wrap up what I can and post articles on them here.  I'd like to cover production tips and troubles I went through to help show just how hectic the business can be especially when dealing with clients who may not know the business.

A peak of what's to come:

1. Ninjas and Bikers face a crazed high end suit tailor with a sword for the cutting-edge in fashion
2. A special band makes an appearance that can improve your quality of life
3. A behind the scenes real is finally in the works for the ACE rail commercial
4. Troy has been writing a short film script that might get shot by summer's end that i'm helping with pre-production for.
5. A Zombie Apocalypse will be spreading soon... very soon.
6. Just shot video for an event in Oakdale with more details soon to come.
7. Much, much, much more... including a novel; several more behind-the-scenes, custom sound effects catalogs catering to game developers and more!