Blog # 6 - The process of Creating My Video

My original decision for a video was to take on the assignment by myself (not pairing with any one else in class) and to have my Senior IT students help me to create an infomercial for my IT class at Greene County Career Center. With the weather and our BPA Regional contest and Awards banquet I had to junk this idea because we have not been in school and in the classroom but 2 days in the last 8 school days. We did not get any video shot for the infomercial so I couln't do it.
I changed and decided to do a solo project on the High School basketball team that I coach. I have 18 games worth of video to work with. Last Monday I took a lot of digital still pictures of my team. A team shot that I added a text title to, and individual shots of each player at the foul line. Had I had more time I would have actually isolated some still shots from within the video tape for each player. I found after I had taken all these shots that the Freshman player that actually took the pictures had changed a setting on my Sony Handycam so that all of my still shots were out of focus somewhat. I did not catch this until I started on my movie. I did the best I could with the auto Level setting, but the pictures are still very out of focus and gariny. With Photoshop I added a layer or two putting the players name and number as well as his year in school and the position he plays.
I learned a great deal about making a movie with this assignment. Did a lot of swearing and slamming things on my desk early. Seems I did not know how to get the video from the DVD on my Handycam into MovieMaker. The .VOB file format the Handycam uses is not supported by MovieMaker. The DAZZLE unit I had for doing this worked only for Windows 98 (when I bought it) and they wanted more money than it was worth for an XP software update. I ended up using the extremely bad Imagemaker toolset that came with the HandyCam to get the video in and then using the Imagemaker storyboard to create a movie and save it in .mpeg format to be able to load that into MovieMaker.
One area I had very little success with ( and need to find out how to do ) is adding the second narrative track when there is a music track. It would not let me narrate with music in the background. Makes for a choppy sounding video.
I am relatively pleased with my movie considering at the very last minute I changed paths and I was able to create a decent movie in a couple of days. Thank heaven I had no school this week.