Wayne D's Blog

When it was time to make another video I asked a question on Mahalo Answers to help me come up with some ideas for a topic. After a few people answered I decided to start with a video on wrapping Christmas presents thinking that it would prove useful to the denizens of Youtube during this holiday season. When I told my wife of my video plans she suggested she should be the one in the video because her gift wrapping skills were better than mine. I told her I'd be happy to let her star in the video. After a bit of through she decided that she wasn't ready to be the gift wrapping mentor to the world so I ended up wearing all the hats of video production and hosting which made me the gift wrap professional, well dedicated amateur actually.

As always prepping for the video shoot was more time consuming than actually shooting the video. Finding a spot where I could shoot the video, lighting, writing the intro and then down into the basement to find suitable wrapping paper to wrap the gift. Find the tape and scissors and I was ready to go. Shoot the video and then it was off to computer for editing. Trying to remember the magic dvgrab incantation I used last time, This time I'm going to write it down here so I won't forget for next time.

[codespan]dvgrab -f mpeg2
mv dvgrab-002.m2t dvgrab-002.mpg
[/codespan]

Though mplayer couldn't play the files dvgrab created Cinelerra had no problem importing them. The newer version of Cinelerra I installed after my problems last time worked almost perfectly, no crashing and only two freezes during file import because of table of content creation issues when I hadn't renamed the m2t files. Transitions, rendering a frame to a png to use as a background for the title and titling all went smoothly. Uploading to Youtube.com turned out to be the biggest hassle, uploading 820 Megs on a 60 KB/s Rogers cable internet uplink turned out not only to be painfully slow tieing up my internet connection for more than three hours before failing, repeat and it failed again. That's all behind me now and the Christmas gift wrap video was finally all wrapped up.