Sleddingly

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music by "My Laptop", courtesy of Music MasterWorks MIDI
principal photography by "Dad"
mixing hosed up by RLMixing, Inc.

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The girls were out enjoying the snow last Thursday before dinner, right about the time the sun was starting to go down. I rushed outside with the camera to get a few shots of it all before the snow melted - as if it were the last snow we're going to see this winter. The big storm had passed, but it was still very cold, and the wind had been blowing fiercely, shaping the snow into bizarre drifts and waves on the east (lee) side of the house and sucking it right off the ground on the other, practically down to the grass. The girls were oblivious to the cold, especially Deb. There was snow to be played in!

Deb started with her traditional sledding technique of sliding down the deck stairs, but that got a bit dull when Mary refused to join in, citing something about the 'negative effects of sharp edges on the exposed surface of the foam-based sledding apparatus' (or something like that); actually, she was a bit nervous about the steep angle of descent and the sudden vector change at the bottom of the stairs. Somehow she convinced Deb to try something a little less daring: sledding down the little hill behind the garage.

Eager to preserve this moment in history, I took some silent video with my old camera, then went inside (where it was WARM) and proceeded to upload it to my laptop so I could make a quick movie out of it. You can see the resulting video above.

It was a lot harder to edit than it was to take!

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How the Movie was Made

I was hoping to use Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows XP since it has a very basic/simple interface that is nearly (but not quite) intuitively obvious, but for some odd reason, the version on my laptop (which has Windows 7 Release Candidate for an operating system) was not working properly. It would accept the AVI file, but could not create any kind of output - WMV or otherwise.

After a little research, I discovered that Win7 doesn't really support MS Movie Maker anymore. It seems Microsoft is eager for people to "move on" to their newer products, so they took something that was working just fine, and made it worse. I had to go online and download Windows Live Movie Maker, the "replacement" for the old application.

This is one of the few times I've seen a new application have fewer capabilities than the old one.

Windows Live Movie Maker has some of the same nice features as the old one, like adding titles and transitions and credits, but the user interface is quite a bit different, and wasn't easy to figure out. Then, after quite a bit of time fiddling with it to get what I wanted, the end result was practically unusable because it inserted "pops" into the audio stream at every transition. Very annoying.

Oh, well. I was going to put in a music soundtrack anyway, since my old camera doesn't record audio.

It seemed simple enough: Replace the existing soundtrack (the one with the "pops") with real music. Surely the music would overwrite the noise, and I'd end up with a great little video, right?

Right.

I used a pre-programmed MIDI soundtrack from my Music Masterworks software: Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (one of my all-time favorites). I routed the MIDI through the sound card using Music Masterworks, utilizing a Piano sound, then recorded it using Audacity. Unfortunately, my laptop's LINE IN input doesn't work, so it actually recorded the output of the speakers through the internal microphone (which explains why it sounds icky). That was stored as a WAV file, then the WAV file was added to the video in the using MS Live Movie Maker.

Key word "added". There is no "replace". So instead of having the nice jazz piano replacing the "pops", I ended up with jazz piano interspersed with "pops" and about a second of silence at every transition. Yuck.

Abanding MS Live Movie Maker for now, I took the silent WMV it had created (since I really liked the transitions and didn't want to lose them), converted it to AVI using WM Converter, stripped out the existing icky soundtrack with SolveigMM AVI Trimmer, then used ZS4 Video Editor to compile it all back together again. (I tried to remove the bad audio with AoA Audio Extractor, but it only grabs the audio in order to create a separate WAV or MP3, it doesn't remove the audio, which is what I needed. I also tried to use VirtualDubMod, but it doesn't remove audio, either.)

Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for such a simple video, but this is all a dry run for my Christmas project, which is going to be much longer and more involved. What is that, you ask?

Guess you'll have to wait and see, won't ya?

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Software Tools mentioned:
Video Editing
* Microsoft Movie Maker (for XP, Vista)
* Microsoft Live Movie Maker (for Win 7)
* t@b ZS4 Video Editor
* VirtualDubMod

Audio Editing
* AoA Audio Extractor
* SolveigMM AVI Trimmer
* Audacity

Music Scoring (MIDI/WAV Generator)
* Music MasterWorks