So today’s post is a tail of woe…. lots and lots of woe.. my brothers and sisters. Well at least I have good coffee to drink while I tell it!
So last month, the month of February. I spent deep in the trenches of an epic remix project. It actually didn’t start out to be quite so epic; the goal was to do it in 2 weeks.. but then.. well you know how those voices in your head can be.. urging you on… and then there was that technology night mare that happened.. more on that latter.. and before you know it.. the remix is the product of a month of 40 hour + work weeks.. never leaving the house….
It probably wouldn’t have been more then 3 weeks if not for the technology woes.. and it might have been just two weeks if so much of the project wasn’t about my growing and stretching and spending time in manuals trying to learn pseudo arcane functionalities of various music production technologies and…
Well in the end the project was rushed.. and I worried that it might suffer for that. I got it in 20 minutes before the deadline.. only to find out the deadlined moved back a day.. and I could have fixed a few things.. but at that point I was so worn out from all the stress and aggravation of the technological battles.. that I was just too emotionally worn out / stretched thin and too attached to the idea of being done with it, to go back and fix anything.
Then there’s the subject of the contest
The remix is for a contest. If you win, you get $1000 and your stuff remix released on the artist’s album.
I’m not sure that a month of 40 hour work weeks.. and all the aggravation, is quite worth a $1000 pay check.. never mind that victory is at best a gamble… but there is a bigger picture of trying to break into remixing.. where it probably is worth it… or I hope it’s worth it anyway.
I ran into this project without really knowing what I was getting into.. having no idea how many other submissions there would be. I just figured “fuck it, I’ll give it everything I got, see if I can win the bastard.” Some kinda idea in your heart that believes this kinda thing can lead to victory.. maybe it’s just watching to many movies or something…. makes you do it.
Votes
After submitting my remix.. I discovered that the contest was about more then just how good my remix was.. or how the judge might judge it, but that there was also this business of trying to get votes.
If I had known votes were important, I wouldn’t have spent my month locked away in the house.. I mean I barely left the house for a month.. because of technology issues I couldn’t have my browser open so I want online…. no I’d have spent a certain amount of time trying to strengthen whatever social ties I might have.. so that I might be in a better position to ask for votes at the end of it..
Also I learned that there were 183 other submissions. (If I knew there would be that many I probably wouldn’t have gone for it) Let me give you my view of this:
You ever try and listen to 183 tracks to try and pick out which one you think is the best? Especially when what we are talking about is a remix.. where you’re hearing some of the same shit.. the same recordings.. 183 times.. and even more so if you’re the artist.. whom had to listen to that same material.. God knows how many times.. during the production of the actual album!!!
What can happen is that it starts to all sound the same.. you’re ears grow tired.. don’t hear the same way.. it effects how you think of what you’re listening to…
So.. it seemed to me that.. Jesus, was he actually even going to listen to all 183 tracks? So clearly I needed to get votes.
Pretty early on.. I was about #23 out of a 183 people…. and I really hadn’t done too much to promote this… which was pretty exciting actually. As of the last I checked.. I’m #19.. and I’m about to give it my final push.
So.. what I decided on was a quick social media strategy.. to try and score more votes
The Promotion strategy
First I wanted to create a video.. The idea of this video is like the extra’s you’ll find on some DVDs: ”look at all the amazing stuff we had to do to create this film, doesn’t that make our film look special” kind of stuff.. everyone talks about how everyone they work with is just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful… and they use this shit to promote the film.
Well.. let me give you just a couple stats on my Remix project. There were about 114 channels, 36 virtual instruments.. when I set it up to look at the mixing console.. where you might say.. set levels for everything… I can stretch that mixer across 2 27″ displays.. and you’re still not seeing half of that mixer.
So the idea was that I would create this kind of elaborate screen casting video.. of the production.. that would show you all that went into it.. if you your self were a electronic music producer.. you could gleam a lot of how I work from the cast.. and if you don’t know anything about music production you’d go “holy crap look at that!”
In a way my strategy wasn’t really about the remix contest it’s self.. or a part of it wasn’t.. a part of it was wanting to get out the word.. that I’m really on a very professional kind of level when it comes to music production.. that it aint no joke.. that I’m the real deal.
But I wont get into all that here.
Next there would be a video.. basically of me talking into the camera.. talking about the contest, talking about what went into the contest.. talking about the screen cast video.. and what you could see on that… and I’d be asking for your vote.. and asking for you to pass the video along.. The key of this video was to make a compelling story.. the story of the remix.. the story of how this fits into my career, the story of where I’m at in life.. a story of drama.. where you hopefully empathize with my plight.. and thus it gets passed around at least a little.
These videos.. in the Youtube tradition.. would have links in them.. a link to the contest page where you can vote.. links between these two videos.. and then another set of older videos.. that sorta show some of the darkness of my life.. just to sorta help drive home that point.
Then I was hoping I could put clips from the video into blog posts where I talk about the production.. and I might even do some screen casts talking about certain music production principles and some of the techniques I use.. many of which.. as far as I know.. I’m probably the only dude who uses them.
Now there were a number of places where I planned on sharing these videos.. or asking people to share.. where I think I could have reached a larger audience.
Other then that.. I would just personally ask people for there votes.. which is what I have to do once I finish this blog post.
And you there.. there were like facebook and twitter components to all of this to…
but then….
The technology woes of the screen cast video
Everything went wrong.. with the videos… First I did a whole bunch of screen casts.. with the idea I’d cut them all together in Final Cut.. and I used Quicktime to do the screen capture.
The issue was that Quicktime.. sucks.. I mean you can only do 15 frames per second.. secondly quicktime screen casts are saved in a file format that you can’t open in Final Cut 7… which is just crazy…
So what I did was I brought them into Compressor and did a batch transcode.. to bring them into Pro Rez.. which is a special video codec especially made for working with video in Final Cut.
Once this was done.. I bought videos into Final Cut.. and started putting them together on the timeline.. In Digital Performer.. it actually gives you time code.. that you would see on the video.. and it can do this in various formats.. so it would be easy to match up videos…
Then I discovered a horrible problem.. the audio and the video were out of synch.. If the audio and video were synched on frame 1, by frame 120 they’d be out of synch…which meant after however much work in final cut.. and like.. day’s worth of screen capturing.. all that time was waisted.
One problem might have been the conversion of 15 frames per second into 29.7 frames per second.. which is the normal video standard.. so then I went and did a more advance batch conversion in Compressor.. that would be better at blending the frames.. but would also take hell of a long time to render.. and then found that they were still out of synch… after waisting yet more time in Final Cut.
At this point I messaged a video professional video production friend.. who’s simple response was “Oh I’d just use Camtasia for that.”
So with that.. it was off to Camtasia.
Now I had this suspicion. See.. during the music production process I had run into some mad technological issues. Basically.. it would take about 10 minutes to open up the project.. you’d work for maybe 5 minutes, and it would crash.. and then you’d have to start over. That’s why I say.. if not for the technological problems.. the project would have taken a week less then it did.
The eventual solution came in the form of hardware optimization. I had cranked up the latency.. if you set one of these programs to have a tun of latency.. you then get a whole lot more processing power.. and often it’s trying to push the processing power too hard that creates the instability… so it made sense to have the latency cranked.
Well it turns out that I was also using a production known as “Liquid Mix” which runs on it’s own DSP chips.. that connects to your computer via a firewire buss… and for some reason.. has it’s own latency settings… and it seems that there was a conflict between these two latency settings that.. in the end.. were creating the mad instability issue.. never mind the conflict of having more then one thing going on your firewire buss..
So.. I cranked down the latency.. the stability issues lessoned.. but.. it hit processor pretty freaking hard.. which meant DP’s user interface becomes sluggish.. and doesn’t update so rapidly.. ( which is the very thing that’s important for your screen cast! ) and this plus however Quicktime was working.. might have been what caused the audio and video to fall out of synch.
So… I went into the project.. and got rid of every instance of Liquid Mix.. and then recranked up the latency.. in order to start doing screen captures with Camtasia… where now the processor hit would not be an issue.
I probably created something like 20 or so screen captures.. of a 4 minute piece.. each time requires a bit of set up.. and whatever.. so it ends up being a good days worth of work.
What I then discovered.. was that I couldn’t work in Camtasia the way I wanted. I layered up the video.. which caused Camtasia to choke.. and it didn’t offer any kind of means of managing the problem.. further more.. the video captured in Camtasia.. you couldn’t open up and bring into another program.. you could only get it out via Camtasia. and what was worse… is Camtasia would only let you bring it out via an MP4 compression scheme.
MP4 video compression is a distribution codec situation.. its for sharing on the web.. it’s not optimized for working inside of a program like Final Cut.. and its a lossy format.. which means.. the video degrades upon leaving the software.
What makes it even worse.. is you have 20 videos.. most of which are about 4 minutes in length.. and the fact that it has to convert a video into MP4 format.. that takes a long time.. so its going to take you another day to freaking get the video out of Camtasia.
Well late last night.. I finally had the video out.. and I had it in Final Cut.. I was working with it.. when I discovered the problem.. the MP4 compression.. had completely destroyed the video… and video that has to look perfect in like 1080p HD…. (because its a screen cast and you have to see all the details on the screen.. and the original screen is a 27″ HD computer monitor.)
I wanted to break stuff. There would be one day left of voting.. and I wouldn’t have a single video done… so I had waisted a week on this freaking video.. and had NOTHING to show for it.
What is even worse.. is that there is serious danger of eviction in my life right now.. and because I’ve been working so hard on this freaking video.. and all this music production stuff.. I’m in that much more danger of becoming homeless.. and all of that for NOTHING.
(the eviction date is in like a week)
Can you tell I’m in a bad mood?
So I haven’t given you the whole story.. of all the woes… and all the gory details.. tried to go through it as fast and concise as possible..
Well if at the end of reading all this you feel some compassion for me and my plight.. Perhaps you can do something for me that would help out a bit.
- Please vote for me in the remix… here’s the link.
- Please hit the like button on the remix contest page for where you can vote for me
- 3 Please share my remix.. and help me get some more votes.
That’s probably asking a lot.. but thank you for the bottom of my heart.
Oh yeah.. and tell me about it to.. so I know there was some love out there somewhere that helped me when I was feeling low like this.
