Hollywood Still Is Not Threatened

I cannot believe how far I jumped in over my head on this supposedly little fly tying video project. After we ironed out our difficulties filming Bern tying his big streamers for catching trout, life did not get any easier.

So far we have filmed several hours of tape, which I had not expected to be necessary. However, Bern is actually an extremely shy man and has no public speaking background. I had to draw on my old debate experience to coach him into trusting his own natural rhythm of speaking.

Despite all my support and encouragement he still frequently froze in mid sentence. He also absolutely refused to allow me to film anything but his hands. I was resigned to having to do the whole video with only his hands and voice.

When he was doing everything right I was still having troubles of my own with the camera. Eventually I began to get along with the autofocus feature, discovering how to keep it from paying attention to the wrong areas.

I began putting segments together in Final Cut Pro and editing all the odd noises out of the audio. Actually I was also having to fit different pieces of audio together as I chose his best spoken parts.

Just remembering how to do the myriad commands possible in the program was a challenge. I often wanted to do something I vaguely remembered and had to go look up the exact process again.

Apparently our gradual progress on the project began to encourage Bern because five weeks into the project he suddenly was willing to speak facing into the camera. I was astonished but quickly jumped on the opportunity.

This, of course, made obsolete most of the work I had already done on the intro section. I also had begun to realize this was not a simple project at all. Every idea Bern had made it more complex, although they were good ideas.

His passions are his art and fly fishing and he wanted this fly tying video to be both. I had just wanted to make a little video showing three flies being tied and that would have been fine with me.

What we have at this point is an intro with him showing his paintings of large trout, telling what streamers he used and where to catch those trout, describing the various world class rivers in the area and the best streamer variations for each river, techniques to effectively fish with streamers, and a mention of his most recent book about his fly fishing paintings.

We have segments that show and describe all the materials used in the flies. And, last, but not least, we have each fly actually being tied with easily understandable step by step instructions. The way Bern speaks now on camera in this final version is amazingly different from the first efforts weeks ago.

Due to the need to make graceful transitions in the video in the many places I had to patch the audio together, I introduced different video to go in parts of those segments. To my immense consternation I have now used at least once almost every single technique described in Apple’s training book on Final Cut Pro.

I was incredibly relieved when I finally got the whole thing together complete with nice moving titles for each section backed by music (hey, we got this far, why stop now!) and decent audio. When we played all one hour and forty-eight minutes, it flowed well and did what it was supposed to do.

It was like birthing an elephant. But it looks like a surprising good elephant. It smoothly covers every area of interest to someone who wants to learn to tie special streamers developed for these rivers.

In my last remaining bastion of blissful ignorance, I thought all I had left to do was burn the dvd.  Those of you who know better please keep the snickering to yourselves.

I currently have a 32 gig movie file I am still trying to figure out how to fit on a single layer dvd without compressing all the quality out of it. This is indeed possible, but I have not deciphered which of the dozens and dozens of settings I need to combine to accomplish that.

Apparently I am stuck with learning how to use Compressor and Dvd Studio Pro to do so. As soon as I post this, I am going to go start reading another 500 page manual. Sigh.

For the previous article in this series, go to Hollywood Is Not Threatened.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.