John & Mark covers "Jessie" (video)

lately i've been fortunate with a opportunity to assist as a photographer and videographer on a music venture by two co-workers of mine. John Lobe (vocals) and Mark Benton (keys) have formed a new and budding two-man band specializing in easy listening music for the older crowd. so far I've recorded them at The Rose Garden in Upton (twice), FireFlies in Framingham, during the Westborough Festival, Borders Bookstore in Shrewsbury, and during rehearsal sessions. most of those footages will be seen on the group's band site.

but i have posted a video on Vimeo i edited during one of their rehearsal session. this video is special to me, because it's the first time i ever edited anything like this. a simple linear editing process using footage shot from two different angles.

• camera #1, front - JVC Everio 30GB HDD, wide screen mode
• camera #2, right - Sony DSC-H9 in standard mode

keep in ming that i'm still working with my 2008 Mac Mini. and working with this little-train-that-could wasn't easy. things are little different now that i'm running Final Cut Express 4 (FCE4) under Snow Leopard 10.6.4. my 2GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB of 667 memory is barely enough to edit a single video source within FCE4. but two?

to make this simple music video required a some prep. first off after extracting the videos from my cameras i had to convert both video sources into readable MPEG2 files, and extract the audio tracks using MPEG Streamclip.

i dumped both video and audio files into a FCE4 project and began the lengthy process of syncing everything together. i wasn't going to use both audio tracks, just the one from the JVC camcorder, as it was the better of the two audios. but both were needed in order to help with the syncing of the two videos. probably not the most efficient way to go about this, but my little mac can't handle the video scrubbing very well. so using the both audio tracks (lined up with their respected video tracks) helped a great deal.

once both video tracks were synced up and match to the main audio track, the next step was to determine how to pan from one video track to the next. after listening to the song and trying to identify certain cues, i ended up with the final edit.

filters were added to both video tracks to help with the brightness, contrast, gamma, and de-interlacing. these took a while to find a satisfactory adjustment, because of the under-powered nature of Mac Mini. actually it wouldn't be so bad if the mini had a real GPU with (and here's the key now) dedicated video memory. but i digress.

after exporting the final cut to an MPEG4, i imported the video into Handbrake. i love this app. it takes all the imperfection found from the original source videos, and the compression process from FCE4 and cleans it up real nicely. because of the poor low-light performance of both cameras at the time of recoding, the source videos were very grainy. Handbrake helped to fix of all - if not most - of that and produced a great quality video playback.

the video sources may not have been the best - i know, it looks 80's-public-access-channel cheesy - but the focus here was on the editing. all in all i'm quite pleased with the final cut. i hope to do more work like this in the future, but first off i gotta get an iMac - i know i keep saying that - along with better camcorders. damn it! why must my hobbies be so expensive?!!!

peace,
@riel