Most of my friends have made far better use of lockdown time than I have. Pretty much all my musician friends have got into video, some in rather a spectacular way. Every time I have attempted to do anything with video it has not turned out well.
I have been trying to get to grips with some very basic functions in Final Cut Pro X, which I bought years ago with high hopes. I have kept it up to date and have even attempted to follow instructional videos on YouTube. Apart from the sheer complexity of all the stuff I could do with FCPX and not really having a clue where to start, a recurring problem has been that captions and titles have not actually been rendered with the rest of any finished product. I haven't a clue why. After watching yet another "how to ..." video I had another go at putting together a little film today. Whatever I did this time, the titles appeared at the end as I intended. Again don't ask me why.
Recording it on the boat was a bit of a challenge. I don't have a camera, so I used the PhotoBooth selfie application on my laptop computer. I didn't want the sound to be the normal computer microphone sound so I plugged in my RME Babyface audio interface along with what I consider to be my best studio microphone, an SE-X1T. I bought the mic in a sale and have rarely used it, but it does look the business. It even has a special box that needs plugging into the mains to power it, so it must be good ...
Clearly there is a mismatch with the gear I'm using. What I noticed first, even while recording, was that there was an appreciable lag between video and audio. I'd noticed this on some other people's videos as well and assumed it was a problem at the editing stage. Well, no, it is a function of recording to computer. The audio defies all the laws of known physics and and travels faster than the speed of light to get there first.
The next thing I noticed while recording was that I could not get through the whole song in one take. There was always something. Usually it was a stumble over the words, sometimes my brain took me back to an earlier version of the lyrics I no longer sing. I had the lyrics in front of me on my tablet, but I had to do it again if I spent too much time looking at them or something would catch my eye and I would be seen glancing sideways. It was too distracting for the viewer. Then there were the flies ...
This year I have left the spiders in the boat pretty much to their own devices. This is because, for a few months, I have a lot of house flies. I thought hungry spiders would help. They don't. These huge spiders are okay abseiling from the ceiling in the evening when I'm trying to read, practise, write, chat or watch something on my tablet, but they show no interest in house flies. Consequently while recording the spoken song the flies showed their appreciation of the spoken word by buzzing around my face or crawling over my head. When I viewed the video it proved so distracting I had to do another take. After about a dozen failed takes to record the piece in one I resorted to the recording studio trick of one verse at a time. Of course, I was never sitting in exactly the same position when it came to recording the next verse. It also looked bad seeing me reach for the space bar to stop the recording at the end of each verse so I had to do it again and wait before I stopped the recording. This meant that the pauses needed to to closed up in the editing. I could do that, but unlike when I'm using an audio editor when I would search for a "zero crossing" when changing the length of sections for inserting crossfades, I haven't worked out where best to make the edit. That meant an audible click between the verses too. I discovered that a transition fade would mask the unwanted noise. I think I counted six flies. I finally managed to get one of each of the verses of "In Your Place" without arthropodal formation dancing on my head, but I do perform imaginative, interpretative, but completely inappropriate, ghostly movements between verses.
I thought I would put it up on YouTube. Then I could l could put links here and on my Facebook page. I was just too excited to have got this far and have some titles to show as well and ended up posting directly to Facebook without remembering to render the video in a smaller format. The file is huge. Facebook took it and presumably has algorithms for dealing with the stupidity of people like me.
I plan to do more of these spoken-word versions of the songs on the album and hope to do better next time. None of us should even think about holding our breaths. It is unlikely to happen very soon.
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