My tweets of the last week:
Personal
Backstage at the Tin Angel
In the bathroom at the Tin Angel, about to go on. There seem to be a lot of people here. Oh my.
Flip Video Hell
Good news: wallet found!
Bad news: still in video encoding hell.
Since I’m sure someone else on the face of the internet is experiencing this issue, allow me to expand:
My project: Shoot video with my Flipcam while I record audio in my home studio. After mixing the audio, sync it to the video in Adobe Premiere for a studio-quality music video to post to YouTube.
Sounds straight-forward, yes?
The Flip is certainly straight-forward – about the size of a pack of cigarettes and operates with a single button. Its 1280×720 isn’t the crispest, but it does well in all sorts of lighting conditions, and can absorb loud sound at concerts without clipping.
That said, the sound is still through a relatively tinny single mic, so adding stereo multi-track audio from my studio marks a vast improvement.
The problem comes when I import the MP4 into Adobe Premiere. It looks beautiful! However, its timing is every so slightly off – compared to the audio track the video falls increasingly behind. The difference is less than a second, but enough to ruin the visual sync of the audio to the video.
Not only is it visible against the video, but you can hear it via an increasing echo if you turn up the audio from the Flip. And after encoding the problem seems even more pronounced.
I’ve been trouble-shooting this for 72 hours, and I can’t discern the source of the problem. So far, I have:
At the moment I am truly and completely stumped. On one hand, it could be that I’m simply not unpacking the MP4 file correctly into a format that I can edit with.
However, my growing suspicion is that the Flip is dropping and/or inserting some frames, and it would only take one or two “skips” to throw the video off several milliseconds against my audio recording.
I lucked out on Monday with “Icy Cold,” which lags just a hair, but since then I’ve been completely frustrated.
Unless some video superhero comes through with an explanation and a fix it looks like I’ll be hawking my Flip to step up to a more pro-sumer model for my upcoming projects.
Updated: Comments from my personal video superhero, Colin, of SeptaWatch.
MPEG is a compressed format, meaning it uses a combination of dropped frames + keyframes to make up for the lack of real data. When you “decompress” the MPEG, those frames are gone forever, so they have to be recreated. This is an imprecise science. Since the Flip is recording compressed video, you’re not recording with any sort of frame-by-frame accuracy.
The songwriter’s job is never done, eh?
PS: Could it be the audio that’s off? It’s possible, but not probable – I’ve been using Cubase for over two years, and my DAW is customized for it. It’s certainly not a logical explanation
Unsynced
I’m supposed to have another video posted for you in an hour or two.
In fact, I do have a video. It’s awesome – more HD, more brand new digital audio, and a song overdue for re-recording.
Except, the sync is off.
Not the whole time, mind you – just starting from about 1:50. I seem to be moving progressively slower than I’m making noise, until at the end of the video I seem to be lip-synching in delayed reaction to a performing Peter positioned somewhere off-screen.
However, that’s not really the case. At least, not in Adobe Premiere when I’m editing the video. There it is crystal clear and perfectly aligned.
Digital video editing is new to me, and I approached it like any other technical skill I’ve acquired in my life – I started doing it blindly and learned more with every mistake. Codecs, lots of mistakes there. Frame rates and aspect ratios, more mistakes. Exporting, metric tons of mistakes.
I’m pretty sure the syncing is not my mistake, as determined by an unreal number of hours of scientific trial and error. Even the almighty Google doesn’t have a lot of light to shed on the situation.
That leaves me on day two of my new project with no product. Honestly, it would have been less frustrating if this happened on day one.
Also, my iPod forgot all of my ratings from yesterday, I think my wallet was stolen on the bus, and I had a dream that Karen O. was following me around the house singing the first verse of “Man” over and over…
…and if that sounds entertaining to you then you clearly are not having the day I am having.
Daily Demo: Icy Cold
Here’s a brand new HD video of “Icy Cold” with beautiful hi-fi multi-track soundboard audio. It comes with a story.
Okay, story-time.
Ten years ago (less 24 days) I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a song called “Icy Cold.”
It was an odd one – very oblique lyrics in one of my more unusual alternate tunings (at the time) made it a challenge to sing and play. I left it off my 2000 demo CD Other Plans and, curiously, also did not consider it for my 2001 studio disc Relief. It remained bound to my apartment, where it factored in to a few of my favorite Trio recordings.
Around the same time I wrote “Icy Cold” – 86th in a rapidly-expanding list of songs – I decided that it was time for me to start playing shows.
Being rather ignorant as to what that entailed, I assumed that I would just phone up a local, mostly-acoustic venue where people I liked frequently played and explain that I wrote tons of awesome songs, and then they would invite me to play. (Later, after my initial flush of success, I could upgrade to playing the TLA or the Electric Factory).
The Tin Angel being the only local mostly-acoustic venue that I knew of at the time, I sussed out their booking information and rang them up.
That was the extent of my year-2000 booking experience at the Tin Angel. No follow-up. No booking. No flush of success.
To be fair, I would have been an utter disaster. I know some people so wonderful that their first ever show was at the Tin, but I was not that kind of wonderful in 2000. Sure, I had the awesome songs, but I could just barely sing, and I was playing a guitar that didn’t even especially stay in tune!
Over the course of the past ten years I’ve done a lot to rectify my singing and guitar-playing issues, and I’ve played in a lot of amazing Philly venues – including the Tin Angel, as part of a showcase with Arcati Crisis. Yet, I’ve never fulfilled that original goal of ten years ago – being featured solo on the bill at the Tin.
Well, that’s going to happen on Friday at 10:30 p.m., so when it came to choosing the first song to post in 2010 in this glorious new HD audio/video combo format it seemed natural to choose “Icy Cold” – especially given the slights it experienced in 2000 and 2001.
Plus, it’s really freaking cold out.
That’s my story.
PS: I owe the hugest possible shout-out to Tim Jahn for explaining Adobe Premiere Pro compression codecs to me via Twitter at the eleventh hour (literally) to make this beautiful video possible. Tim writes a blog of occasional, thought-provoking bulletins that I have been enjoying for months. You can also follow him on Twitter.