4.234 video win

Sunday 07/23/2023

My main activity today was to shoot Mary. That is, to make a video of my neighbor Mary, who is also our chorus director, singing “Walkin After Midnight”, and make her look good. I’d obsessed about that for a while Saturday night (as noted in 4.233), now it was time to put those obsessively-laid plans to work.

I was in the auditorium setting stuff up about 10am, when of course the actual shoot was scheduled for 1pm. But there were some unknowns, and I was glad to have plenty of time alone with the equipment to work out the kinks.

When Mary and Stew came in at 1, everything went very smoothly. We only shot two takes. The visual quality was excellent. I used my Nikon, taking advantage of its lens and the ability to adjust exposure and so on. I used our stage lights well, I think, and generally made Mary look good.

There was an issue with the sound. Mary sang along with a video of Patsy Cline. Although the audio from that video was loud in the room, in the sound recording I was taking off the sound board into my second Macbook, Mary’s voice was much louder. The two sounded balanced in the room, but not in the recording. I decided that I could “fix it in post” as the movie people say, and we wrapped up.

Back in my room I put my video of Mary, the recorded audio track, and the audio track from the YouTube video, all together in iMovie, and tweaked the levels of the two audio tracks until it sounded like a nice balanced duet. I was pleased with the result and when I mailed it to Mary and the Hoedown planning committee, everybody was pleased.

Let’s see if I can embed that here… no it appears not.

Well, this link will not be good for more than a couple of weeks but here it is. Credit where it’s due, it was Stew who brought the straw hat and talked Mary into wearing it.