Yesterday evening, I did some more production work on 'You hold me': there was an arpeggio being played throughout the second verse that sounded very lame (a hackneyed synth patch), so I changed this for an oboe. Now the sound is somewhat mysterious. I also fiddled a little with the vocal, primarily shortening the drawn-out 's' that is at the end of the word 'games'. Once I finished that, I mixed the song a few more times until I had a very good version.
This morning I woke up and thought that I should make a video of the song so that I can upload it to YouTube. I wanted to make a video that showed the words synchronised to the tune: I looked at some web application that purports to do this but this seemed to be too complicated for me (there was no example with lyrics). So I went to the usual solution, Windows Movie Maker. I decided that the video would consist of pictures of our garden, of which I have many. Synchronising the words wasn't too difficult as YHM is a very slow song; the words were implemented as titles for the pictures, requiring me to stretch the pictures and the titles over several seconds.
At some stage, as always, WMM got stuck (the memory that I added to the computer a few months ago didn't seem to make any difference). This time, however, WMM was royally stuck and I was left with no alternative but to terminate it via the Task Manager. When I restarted the program, I was informed that "The collection file is not valid or is corrupted"; I think that the collection file is where all the pictures that comprise the video are stored. I did some cleaning up with regard to pictures prior to the previous save (or maybe after the previous save) so I wasn't too perturbed by this message. Unfortunately, a second error message then appeared, that WMM couldn't create a new collection file. WMM then closed.
This is when I started panicking. I restarted WMM - same messages. On-line help suggested finding the backup file to the collection file and restoring it ... but there's no backup file. In the directory C:\Users\asus\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Movie Maker there exists the file MEDIATAB0.DAT but this is presumably the corrupted file. I couldn't find any backup file or file with a similar name anywhere on my computer. I reasoned that maybe deleting this file would allow WMM to create a new collection file ... except that I couldn't delete the file because it was locked by WMM. I restarted the computer and had lunch.
When the computer finished its restart, I deleted the file and restarted WMM - yes, a new collection file was created. Taking a deep breath, I continued working on the video, although this was getting very tiresome. I then took the dog for a long walk and considered what to do. I decided to film as many videos as necessary in order to use these instead of the still pictures; the more transitions there are, the harder WMM has to work, so reducing the number of transitions by using a 40 second video is better than having several transitions between 10 second stills.
So I went into the garden and started filming. I had hoped that I could achieve a long enough film in one shot, but this proved impossible. I also had the sun flashing the camera every now and then which didn't help. In the end, I had about three and a half minutes of usable film; the rest of the time I filled with stills. Even though I deleted all the stills that I had added in the morning, the song lyrics stayed where they were which made my life much easier. I had to add some splits into the final segment of video in order to get the last verse in, but otherwise I worked much faster than I did in the morning.
Watching the completed video was very difficult, so I finalised it, creating a WMV file, then added it to a program that I have that creates mp4 files from WMV. Then I uploaded it to YouTube and the video can be found here.
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