Here’s A Not So Funny Story
So if you read my last update post then you’ll know that I had a plan to create this video podcast with a few friends of mine, well I’ve done just that. Sort of.
It started last week, I finally made the decision to film this thing. After all of the thought and planning it was time to finally do it. Instead of getting everyone to vote on what film we were going to watch I decided to take the initiative and choose Birdman. We set the date as well, we were going to film it on the Saturday.
So we went about our week, we all watched the film in preparation. I even took notes so that I could have a general idea of what I wanted to talk about. Preparation is key. Now it’s Saturday, I messaged the other participants to give them a time to arrive. 7:30pm. Throughout the day I was remembering different things that we needed, I’d end up messaging one of the participants to remind them off certain things. I had a mini-breakdown about recording using multiple microphones as I knew it’d be so much effort for me to edit. This participant said they’d help out with the edit if I needed it. Well a few hours go by and it’s finally time for everyone to arrive, I had already moved furniture around so that we could all sit comfortably around a table and be in frame for the wide camera. We finish setting up all 3 cameras after some difficulty with differences in the way they operate. Now everyone is mic’d up, the cameras are rolling and I call the start with my clapper board. It goes pretty well, I realise about 5 minutes it that I had forgot to turn the directional microphone on the camera on but that’s not a huge issue. That segment finishes and then we realise that the wide’s timer hadn’t been changed and C camera had decided to stop recording for seemingly no reason. B camera had captured all of it but the framing was worse than I had originally thought. Eh, whatever we rolled with it.
We decided to switch the wide with the B camera as we thought this would be better for capturing the entirety of the segment without worrying about the other two camera’s timers. Well, I made the hair-brained mistake of not emptying the SD card after moving footage from it, meaning that once again the wide did not capture all of the footage and obviously the other cameras had lower timers on them. Not a huge issue, I’ll just cut to a logo screen and use the remaining audio we captured. We decided that from now on we’d be doing an audio only show as capturing with multiple cameras is more effort than it’s worth. For the final segment we decided just to use the wide camera, this time I made sure to empty the SD card so the camera should have captured the entire thing. That whole thing was mentally draining and I have no intention of doing that again any time soon.
Move into the edit, this is where things get really fun. The next night I began working on the edit, I went about syncing up 3 different cameras and two different audio tracks which is more difficult than it really should be seeing as you can’t see the clapper in B camera and B camera’s audio was corrupt. I got about 5 minutes into the edit, cutting in and out of 3 different pieces of video in the most annoying way possible because I couldn’t figure out how to multi camera edit in Premiere. Well, time to check the footage. I go to render out the first 5 minutes, while this is happening I’m watching some YouTube. After a short period of time I get an error message from Windows, telling me I’m about to run out of memory. I was shocked at first because I have like 2 hard drives, 2 ssd’s, 3 external hard drives, but I quickly realised it was talking about RAM. Clicking away from this message immediately caused Chrome to close, I jumped back into Premiere to cancel the render when I realise it had completely frozen up. I close Premiere in Task Manager, yet for some reason my computer thought it was still running and wouldn’t let me reopen it. This prompted a restart. Decided to say fuck it for the night, I didn’t want to spend my night stressing out over it.
So I tried to edit it again today, I opened the project to realise that it hadn’t saved any of my progress. I make multiple different sequences so that I can break the edit up so it’s easier to manage. I begin working on it again, saving after every little action. I was barely able to sync all the footage up before the playback tab froze up, I tried everything to get it to unfreeze but it was having none of it. Fuck it, I’ll just close Premiere. So I do just that, except guess what, the damn thing froze even worse then. Premiere crashed, yet again… I’ve never had this much of an issue editing something so this is really pissing me off.
So now I’m at this point, the thing is that there are so many damn things wrong with this even for a that I probably wouldn’t even make it publicly available. At this point though it’s more like my pride is kicking in, I really don’t want all of the effort that we put into this damn thing to go to waste but that seems to be what the end scenario for this is. I’m beyond pissed. Luckily my friends seem to like this concept so we’re definitely going to continue with the podcast idea, we just won’t be doing this whole multi-camera method again any time soon. it’s gonna be mainly audio only until we have the ability to come back and do this better.
