Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Italian holiday film

I thought that I would do something useful with all the time that I have on my hands (it's the Passover holiday which lasts a week) and so decided to create a film from our 2018 holiday in Italy

The first step in doing so is to convert all the MOV files to WMV format so that Movie Maker can handle them; there is a program which does this painlessly albeit slowly. At the same time, I discovered that there were a few files which lasted several minutes and generally showed pictures of my shoes or the inside of my bag: these files were created when I thought that I was turning the camera off when in fact I was turning it on. Of course, I tried not to convert these files, thus saving time and space.

All the videos are organised by day which makes it very easy to know where to find those per topic. I discovered that I had no stills saved - probably due to the great disk crash - but five minutes with my wife's telephone yielded over a hundred photos. As each file's name is basically the date and time of the picture being taken, it was also easy to categorise them.

The next stage was to build a rough cut of the film: Pisa, Riomaggiore and Lucca, then various aspects of our stay in Torino. Once this was done, I slotted in stills; in the past I have presented videos of a location followed by stills of the same, but this time around I mixed stills in-between the videos whenever it seemed appropriate. I also added the transitions, almost always fading from one piece to the next. About half of the stills had the wrong orientation but they seemed to right themselves whenever I watched a preview so I didn't bother to rotate them. 

Once I had everything in the desired order, I added music. There are a few scenes which have their own 'soundtrack': I filmed one scene early in the morning on the roof of our Pisan hotel and all that can be heard are birds so I left this as is. Another scene has about ten Hare Krishna devotees winding their way through the tables of people eating al fresco - obviously they had to be heard. I left in a portion of David Byrne in the cinema museum but found a way to download the complete video from Youtube and include it as an appendix to the film. 

As I have noted in the past, the pain of working with Movie Maker grows as the composite video lengthens. A minimal change at the end of the film requires the computer to become unresponsive for a few minutes. But that's nothing compared to the final part which is the most painful of all: mastering. This procedure takes all the little bits of video and pictures and makes one cohesive file of them all, taking about 45 minutes. Then I watch the completed film ... and see that most of the photos need to be rotated. Another 45 minutes of mastering and then I see ... that two pieces of video have incomprehensibly been added twice. I remove them - then I have to fix the soundtrack as the gaps are now out of synchronisation. This takes about ten minutes and then I have to publish the film again. 

I thought that the fourth revision had fixed everything, but to my horror I discover that the volume has been muted in the section where David Byrne appears in the film museum! Fix this then master again..... Whilst this process is conceptually the same as mixing songs then mastering them, the major difference is the time factor: mastering a song takes around a minute, depending on the length of the song and the number of effects, so it easy to go through several revisions in a short period of time. Mastering films takes a l-o-n-g time.

Obligatory Covid-19 reference: whilst it is great to see again these places that I remember fondly, sadly I wonder when the field by the tower of Pisa or the road of Riomaggiore will be filled again by throngs of happy tourists. Maybe they never will again and this film will serve as a memorial which I can show to our grandchilden: see how it was before the virus! People could walk in the streets, stop, chat and even eat in the open! No masks, no gloves. 

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