Monday, March 31, 2008

A Newbie's first attempt at blog video - Beth's 6th grade Band Concert

One of the things we hope to be able to do is post video from our Russia trips and from our adoption experience. To this end, we have a new video camera (really cool... Sony DCR SR300, has a 40GB hard drive... no tapes!) and an eager Dad ("geek in the making") all ready to go. The problem is that I'm a little new at this... not at shooting video mind you, just at posting it. Do I put up the video in it's native format (16:9, high bitrate) or do I re-encode it to a lower bitrate to make the file smaller? I've re-encoded this one so the file is just over 2MB instead of the 100 MB it was originally. It hurts the video quality... a lot. I'll eventually settle on a happy medium. I STRONGLY suspect that I'm making this way too hard, but here it goes.

For my first venture, the subject matter is Beth's 6th grade winter band concert. Our school district starts band in 6th grade, so this isn't exactly the New York Philharmonic quite yet, but it really isn't bad for a bunch of kids who have only been playing for around 4 months. They had an "informance" (as opposed to a performance) in the fall where they played "Hot Cross Buns". As you might have guessed, that riveting "informance" wasn't quite ready for prime time blog posting (and I didn't have the camera yet anyway). This video is of Beth's first "real" concert and this is the most complex piece they played. Beth loves playing and is making strides quickly. She's already MUCH better than when this concert took place a month ago. In fact, she and I are starting to play together (she on clarinet, me on guitar... that's quite a combo!)

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