When you are a solo artist you have to wear many hats. No pun intended, but I do love my old hats. Not only do you have to work to improve your ability to perform and entertain, you have work to stay booked, you have to work to write and record original material, you have to keep a website up to date, you have to BLOG and other things to keep your website visible to Google and Bing, you have to set up and tear down, you have to drive and drive and drive and in the world we're in now, where videos are king, you have to be able to record and edit your own videos. In the past I have done OK with this. I've mostly used my iPad and Video One app to create OK looking videos. But I've wanted to do more with both video and recordings so as my laptop reached the end of her days I opted for a Macbook this time and after a few weeks of getting to know it I've begun to be very productive with my other Apple. :-) So for these 3 videos I edited them with iMovie. I had known the concert at Stonefield Cellars would be a good one because the crowds love me there for some reason and they are always lively and involved. So I had decided to make a remote live recording of the whole show in hopes of getting a new Live CD... more on that in another post. So for these movies there were 3 songs that were also randomly recorded by Lynn as a movie too. Small Town and Every Little Bit Counts by James McMurtry as well as the funny song Take It Out Back by Chuck Brodsky.
In hopes of helping my other performing buddies I wanted to tell you about my learning process... what works when trying to combine a song with a video and what does not. At first I thought my editor of choice on the Mac would be Finalcut X. It is so feature rich and is used by major networks to create shows like Leverage, etc. It also touts a feature of magically linking different clips together and syncing the audio/video to a magic timeline. After days of playing with this I finally gave up. I'm sure it works great for those smarter or more patient than me, but I found I was spending way too much time trying to learn a new tool instead of making something. So, I dropped back to iMovie 11. It was much easier. I was already comfortable with how it works because I had used it many times on my iPad. But the Mac version is so much more powerful.
In fact I found it could easily do everything I had wanted to do with my live show video. Which was have a consistent theme, good looking titles and trailers and be able to sync pictures and music as cutaways. It did take a while to get the hang of adding the song WAV file to the project. I bet others think as I did... drop it above or below the video track and it will be separate. Wrong. You have to drop it on the track and iMovie does the magic. Go figure. The theme selection and title work was pretty straight forward and while the number of themes is a little limiting, it works for me. Syncing the audio track and video after the fact was a little more difficult, but after zooming in as far as I could and showing both WAV forms I was able to match them on all three songs and not have it come out like a Godzilla movie gone bad. The movies were shot with an iPhone/4S without a tripod. We learned we need to invest in a tripod for the phone but the video for the phone was really good quality. In fact, using just the one video I was able to use features of iMovie to create multiple camera angles and pans and the quality held up great.
I also had to take some advice and put these it there even though they are not perfect. I mean they sound good, at least to me but, stupid me really screwed the words on the first verse of Hollywood up. Folks that love Jackie Greene as much as I do would have noticed... if not you may have just thought, that's interesting. :-) But the song is so cool and the vibe was there so in the end I decided to jut be open and say wow, sometimes I screw up in a live show. I love the songs I'm doing in my concert settings now... They are who I am right now and where I've ended up on this journey. Not to say there's not another destination for my music but where I am now is a fun place to be.
I hope you enjoy these videos and if you do, please do a few things for me. 1) Click Like on YouTube. It helps me get these things and my music promoted. 2) Leave a comment on YouTube. 3) Share via email or Facebook from YouTube. Thanks for checking in with me. If you are not viewing this from my website, http://www.OwenPoteat.com, I hope you'll visit it so see my pictures, upcoming events and much more.
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