Fall 2007, Week 8

Full steam ahead. Chugging away at production.

Really not too much to say here. I guess I could say that I am totally pumped up about being in the full swing of production. Everything is going smoothly for once. Here's what I do:
Insert U-Matic tape into deck. Fast forward to the end, rewind to the beginnging. This acclimates tape the the environment and gets rid of bad tension on the spools.
Play tape into computer through DVCAM deck. While playing tape I capture in Final Cut Pro. I then export a DV NTSC 48 kHz Quicktime movie to the hard drive. I then transfer that file to the library server.

Next I select a segment of the video for the web collection, or use the whole thing and export a Flash video file (.flv). Move this to the server. Select a freeze frame from the video to use as a thumbnail for the video. Export as jpeg and move to server. I also clean up the ends of the video so there rough ins and outs. Though part of me wonders if I should be saving the color bars.

Next is the metadata creation, for which we're using Dublin Core. Here's a link to my single completed record: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/atn&CISOPTR=0&CISOBOX=1&REC=1

The trouble with the metadata for me so far has been the uncontrolled vocabulary "Keywords" attribute. Its difficult to accurately define video art.

What else...? Oh somewhere in there we up load the .flv files to a different server that will house all the video for my collection.

Oh and a problem I ran into: 30 minutes of video is about 6.34 GB. When transfering these files over to the library server, the server connection times out. So what I have to do is cut these videos in thirds, keeping the segments under 3GB. This means that whn working with the files in the future we will have to stitch the video back together. Not too difficult, but still this NOT ideal.