Boy, I’m finding out that tweaking in audio visual format is a lot different–and maybe harder, at least technically–than tweaking the written story.
Besides the words or language, there’s the all important timeline synchronization to consider. For example, while Recycling was just a learning project, the artist in me couldn’t keep some things that weren’t quite right or obvious flubs from eating into the wanna-sleep part of my being.
So I re-recorded the audio to eliminate a background noise that stuck out like a sore thumb–shifting into position and rustling a paper while reading. There was then the problem of either clipping the stanza and replacing it in the video or replacing all. Since there was also some "white noise" in the background of the first recording, I decided it best to replace the whole thing.
The added problem of time lengh difference–a full ten seconds shorter on the second recording–then rose to create havoc. Remember, this is after carefully shortening or lengthening the time span of each image frame to fit the original recording. The good part is that the audio can be split into parts, in this case, stanzas, and then moved around a bit. Without the background noise in this recording, I could make up the time difference not only by shortening all the image time frames, but separating the recording segments.
This, in a program that crashes after every couple of moves. I’ve since learned to move, save, move, save, move, save…until action is halted by freezing. After a final tweaking, I saved the file as a copy as well, then to the movie .wmv format (can’t save as .avi in Windows Movie Maker)
Then, of course, before sending replacement copies to the other computer as a backup and to this weblog, I’ve learned to really, really check it all again and make sure it’s as good as it can be–for the moment.
I’ve done all these steps many times already this morning. And ya know what? It just occurred to me that maybe I should’ve considered editing the poem itself.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology