CES 2006 AVS Forum Party video

That was a GREAT party! I had a really good time and met a lot of folks there. :)

I have lots of pics to share from the Party (and from CES itself) and will post them when I return home.

Today is going to be a long day, they are telling everyone to get to the airport 2 1/2 hours early. So I am leaving here at 6am and won't be getting back to Connecticut until 10:45 tonight.

Thanks go to David Bott for throwing a great party including his sponsors (Especially Sam Runco who I enjoyed talking with)
 
Scott- I know you didn't bother to download the video since you are on slow dialup aol, but I managed to get you in it. When I was shooting stage right you were standing in the background with your camera by your right side. :) Proves you were there!

Thanks, Scott for joining me this year so we could finally meet in person. I am proud to be a member here from the beginning. Wishing you a safe journey home. I will be doing a similar trek tomorrow. Wish I were staying until Tuesday when the airport will be dead.
 
I am actually in the airport now, got here at 6am, and my flight is not until 9:45. They are telling everyone to get here 2 1/2 hours early because of security, but when I got here there was NO line.

I got a bunch of AVS photos I am going to upload them in a few minutes.

Again it was a great party. :)
 
Don Landis said:
Just some excerpts from the headliner entertainment.
http://www.tv-shopper.com/CES2006/AVSPARTY.wmv
This will require a broadband connection of at least 350kbps to watch. Or, you can right click on the link and download it for local play.
Nice camera work and editing! How many camera men did you have? :D
 
Ilya said:
Nice camera work and editing! How many camera men did you have? :D

I got the video, but I'm looking for the latest codecs for my player. The audio was out of syc by a few beats. :D
 
the sound quality is bad. If you went to the trouble to have several people recording and then were gonna edit you should've gotten a line level recording from the mixer
 
There was no line at security Sat. 2PM either. LAS airport does have a fairly fast FREE wifi connection.
AVS forum party was great - w. good entertainment. I still wish they would heed the suggestions many of us made and require everyone to wear name badges. I would have liked to see, in the flesh, people who are just names here.
Have to thank Scott for his patience and time at the DISH booth on Friday. Unfortunately, there were only about 5 of us there, including Don L. Scott knows more than some of the floor reps there - altho Scott did have one very knowledgeable tech guy talk to us.

I don't use my real name on this board because I have and talk about a Canadian DBS system (BEV). Since it is unknown whether any authorities really care about that, I pay for the service, just use a psydonym. (Real name is Mike T.)

...mike
 
Here is the techie scoop on how I did it.

The video was shot with a single 4 Mpixel Canon G3 digital still camera to one 256 Mb CF card. The video clips 18 in all were done from about 7 floor positions throughout the entire performance medley. The frame size was 320x240 with 32K audio sampling and I upconverted it to 720x480p 48Khz resampled in both Sound Forge 7.0 and the video in Windows Movie Maker to make the clips avi compatible with Sony Vegas 6.0 codecs using a batch process.

Next I ported all the clips into Vegas6.0, about 18 minutes worth, for editing.

Since I didn't have multiple cameras running iso or a location mix console, I used an editor's choice of shots MOS ( without audio) as alternative camera positions to make the illusion of a multiple camera shoot, live switch. The choice of which shot to use was made based on the tempo of their music. I divided their stage performance into three categories, fast, medium and slow. Simple eh? Then I made an editor's choice of which numbers to use as a base layer for actual sound and video. On top of that I went to my library of similar tempo numbers they did that I shot from different positions around the stage and searched for basic dance moves by them that were similar although actually performed for a totally different sound track. There was no effort to hide lip sync since the entire shoot was intentionally avoiding extreme facial closeups. :) I grouped the insert b-roll shots just based on the choreography and the tempo category.
I also had seen their routine last year so I had a good idea what they do. I guess the hardest part was the Harmonica because it was mixed with singing and that added one more factor into choice of inserts. In some cases I actually repeated the shot because I felt it was more important to break up the single camera look if held too long. When I had to do that I compensated to hide that by pushing in and reframing in the virtual camera mode in Sony Vegas so it hid that scene repeat.
Upconverting to 720x480P resolution prior to editing from the Canon 320x240 mode aids in this as it forces a sub pixel imaging for the effect, thus preservibg the quality as long as you don't push in too far. If you do, just keep the scene short and it should fly by and only a few would ever see that. Obviously, I also knew that my final output was going to be 320x240 at DSL resolution bit rate so I could get away with more than if I knew I needed to maintain the upconvert for a DVD dub. This video clip will not be done to DVD! At least not by me. :)

All the sound was captured by the tiny onboard mic in the Canon digital still camera I learned not to finger the camera when live! Otherwise it does pretty good. The final output was volume compressed and maintained in typical stage performance volume in post.

I picked out my opening sound talking and ending sound talking and accompaning video and then built the center.

Time wise- I spent about an hour just watching and listerning to the clips about 3 times making notes on where stuff was that I needed. Then I did the opening number, shortened it for time using audio fades and same for base video. Did same with the ending number and closing comments. Good opening and strong close are most important in any video. Then I knew what I needed time wise to fill in the middle for a 5 minute video. This process took a little over an hour of time line editing after about 30 minutes of batch upcoversion in Windows Moviemaker. Put in a few graphics and rendered to windows Media 9 converting the video to 320x240 29.97 fps and the audio to 44Khz 16 bit mono resampling in the wm9 build. I was hoping for about a 12 Mb file which is where it ended up. (experience)

Finally checked it for intollerable errors, found one but decided to let it go. That may be where you thought the sync was out because he doesn't quite get the Harmonica to his mouth and the Harmonica sound begins.


For fun stuff like this I like using the little Canon still camera because it is simple and not much room to get too creative, but more importantly, shooting tape and digitizing in the field properly just requires too much extra stuff, Firewire cables and external hard drive. This way I just stick the CF card in the slot and begin to work on the video. The advantage of mini dv would have been already in Native DV format and I could save time with the upconversion and have better quality but the time to upconvert was equal to the digitizing, almost. A tradeoff so I pick quick and easy.


Well, that's how it was done. If you do not have the wm9 codec your windows XP should make an automatic upgrade assuming you are connected to the internet. If you are still on something older then you may need to go to the website and see what they have to play wm9 video. I understand that MAC OS10 has an updated codec for wm9.
 
I knew it was an edited collage, but I didn't guess it was from several different songs. Nicely done. :)
 
BFG said:
the sound quality is bad. If you went to the trouble to have several people recording and then were gonna edit you should've gotten a line level recording from the mixer


BFG- There are always choices in how to do a live show "right"? I've done it just about every way you can but I can assure you pulling a feed off the PA board is not one of those "right" ways. The best way, IMO, is to set up an isolated mix down from the band mics and mix to the number of tracks you can record. With my Beta SP equipmant it is 4 so I put the music mixdown to 2 channel on AFM tracks and stereo hall sound on linear tracks and remix in post. If shooting DVCAM it is 2 so I always choose a stereo pair of mics since it is trouble to delay the mixer sound from mics. Then four tracks you can slide the hall tracks to compensate for time delay of the music in post. But for something like the AVS party... well as they say it wasn't in the budget! :D
 
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Looks like a good party! Too bad I missed it :(. I got in my car at the Venetian at 6:15, and moved 1 floor down by 7:15. Since I was on the 8th floor of the garage, I decided there was no way in hell I was leaving that garage by 9pm. So we just reparked and ate at Venetian.

It was good meeting the other members of the board on the floor at Dish though!
 
Yeah nothing like a room of 34+ yr old electronic nerds partying to a Blues Brothers cover band :D
 
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There are parties for the under 25 set so why do they come to the 40+ parties and then complain about it being a 40+ party full of old farts? :D
 
Heh, that younger set. Just wait until they are part of the 40+ crowd. They'll get excited when they hear of the mosh-pit at the party, only to find out that that's in reference to the catered mash potatoes. :)