Monday, December 15, 2008

Windows and movie making.....

Just doesn't go together does it? I have spent a lot of the day, inbetween the aforementioned depression and visits to the loft with towels, messing around with Windows Movie Maker and Audacity. The thing I need to do is put together the audio and video for the bit that we're doing in the staff show this year. Last year was full drag, this year it's just ABBA.

So one of the TAs got us a 4 minute mix of ABBA songs and I said I'd quickly knock together something to go with it. The theory being that the more things we have going on at once, the better it will be. (Or at least the kids will have more to look at and enjoy).

Plan 1: Put together some intro music - clapping, cheering, shouting, general stuff like that. Using Audacity and my music collection that was no problem. Probably more time consuming than it really needed to be but all beautifully simple and easy to use.

Plan 2: Get the ABBA videos of the songs from the mix and edit them together as a backdrop. Oh bloody hell. I'd always heard people talk about how video editing should onlhy ever be tried, especially by a novice, on a mac. I believe it now. Wrong formats, wrong codecs, wrong this, wrong that. I tried getting freeware to do the trick, but even that let me down. In the end, after much trial and error, I settled on Windows Movie Maker and a very simple plan. But windows still insisted on fucking it up several times and crashed repeatedly. Bless it.

So after far too much extra work on this thing I now know Audacity and at least some rudimentary movie maker program well enough to use it in lessons with the children. A great result. And yet another thing off the to-do list.

One small benefit to the whole ABBA thing is that, as I'm playing Benny, I can quite legitimately go unshaven all week in an attempt to grow my Benny beard. Sort of makes up for the enormous embaressment of getting up and doing the thing I guess.

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