Life and times of an amateur video-maker
It’s been an exciting week. On Friday, a small group of us
launched a campaign to raise awareness of children’s language learning
impairments (RALLI). We’ve
been fortunate to have had considerable help from TeamSpirit, an agency
whose expertise in marketing and advertising has been invaluable. With their
assistance, we’ve set up a YouTube channel, which has kicked off with some
professionally-made video shorts to introduce the campaign. But we don’t have
funds to continue with a lot of expensive professional services, and so our
plan is to post a mix of content on the site, including some videos made by the
RALLI team. We are four academics and a speech-and-language therapist, none of
whom has any expertise in filming, but the TeamSpirit folks were reassuring.
What we needed was a digital flipcam, which would allow us to film ourselves in
high definition video, download to the computer, and upload to YouTube. Easy
peasy. Or so I thought. Before I began this exercise, I was a straightforward
atheist. Now I believe in supernatural forces, but they aren’t benign.
The camera arrived in the post and looked great - same size
as a mobile phone. I studied the manual. There was a battery. There was a slot
labelled ‘battery compartment’. But there was a problem. The battery did not
fit in the battery compartment, whichever way I tried. I grumbled to my PA that
we’d been sent the wrong battery. She discovered a bit of the manual that
explained how to insert the battery - in a quite different place. I left her to
play with the camera while I went off to prepare a lecture, as she was clearly more
suited to this than me. She emailed me to say that the camera worked well, but
there was a snag. It stored exactly 30 seconds of footage. Should you want more
than this, you had to buy a memory card. This is what went in the ‘battery
compartment’. So, my plans for starting filming were foiled.
Onto the Kodak website. Astounded by how much I’d have to
pay for a memory card. Realised I’d also need some kind of tripod to stabilise
the camera when filming myself. Registered on the website, put in an order, tried
to pay with Paypal, password rejected. Having assumed various emails from
Paypal were spam, I was now uncertain as to whether or not my recorded password
was still valid. But I wasn’t going to get a chance anyhow, as my failed
password had somehow aborted the whole operation. Too busy to start again, so
decided I’d take a look in Currys to see if I could buy memory etc.
The Currys option was the only positive thing to happen.
Found a dinky little cushion thing that you could screw your camera into that
cost far less than a tripod and worked as well. Also found that, as I didn’t
plan to record hours of footage, I could buy a small memory card much more
cheaply. So I was ready to go except for one thing. I needed an external
microphone.
We had had a clearout of our lab a few months ago, during
which we’d found a huge cache of microphones. For years we did research on
language disorders that involved making good quality tape-recordings of
children, and we had clip-on microphones, boundary microphones, big
microphones, small microphones, none of which had been used for years. However,
they had all been carefully put away. Somewhere. I thought I was getting close
when I found a box full of headphones, but no. Several boxes later, I gave up. I
wonder if other people have boxes full of cables that connect together things
that you have never used, have no idea what they’re for, but can’t bear to
throw away.
Eventually, a savvy member of my team arrived and located a boundary
microphone, which I took home with me to experiment with over the weekend.
Well, I guess this microphone had once been good, but it had lived in a box for
about 8 years. I assumed that the little round battery in it was now well dead,
but there were a couple of spare batteries still in their original packaging.
Like most contemporary packaging, this was designed to give you the
impression that if you attack it with fingernails, you might get in, when in
fact this is not the case. The only result is a broken fingernail. What is
needed is scissors, and so I now went on a scissor-hunt. Eventual success,
though why scissors should be in the fruit bowl I do not know.
No indication as to which way round the battery should go,
and I’d made the mistake of removing the existing one without checking. Tried
new battery one way up. Nothing. But now a problem. The battery sat happily in
the battery hole and did not want to come out. Tried fingernails, tried
prodding with nail-scissors. It wobbled, but it wouldn’t budge. Gave to
husband. He tried fingernails, and tried scissors. Then he had a remarkable
insight. “What we need,” he said, “is a magnet”. This seemed to me no more than
a theoretical speculation of no practical relevance. But he went further, and
demonstrated his true genius in lateral thinking. “We need the little red man.”
The little red man is a fridge magnet that we’d been given for Christmas. Downstairs
to the kitchen again. The red man’s magnetic feet proved to be the perfect size
for extracting little round batteries from microphones. We removed the battery.
We rotated the battery. We reinserted the battery and plugged the microphone
into the flipcam. Made a recording. Couldn’t hear any sound. What we now
needed, clearly, was headphones. Headphone-hunt ensued. Headphones eventually
located in the bedroom. Plugged in. Well, there was sound, but it was very
faint. I tried modifying the controls on the flipcam to improve the gain, but
that had minimal effect. Here my amateur
knowledge of technology failed me. If it was faint, could it mean that the
battery was running out of juice? Husband thought unlikely but we did have one
more spare battery to try. Another assault on packaging with scissors and we
were in. We had another go with red Pete’s feet, but the new battery didn’t
work at all. At this point it was getting late and husband was impatient to
watch another episode of Breaking Bad (highly recommended: we are on series 3),
so I gave up for the night.
Next morning decided to look in the geological specimen
cabinet to see if I could find an alternative battery. This is an amazing piece
of furniture that we picked up in a country auction about 30 years ago. Its
original function was to store bits of rock, but it is a godsend for a hoarder,
as it allows you to hoard your useless objects in labelled mahogany drawers.
One drawer is called Batteries. The problem is that the batteries that live in
it tend to be very old, but I did find some that were small and round and
labelled as “For use only in NHS hearing aids.” Husband, who has a hearing aid,
denied all knowledge of them. Ever optimistic, I decided to try one in my
microphone, feeling ever-so-slightly wicked at disobeying the stern injunction
on the packet. The battery fitted in the microphone slot very snugly. I tried
recording. I got a signal, but it was even weaker than before. Oh well, I
thought, maybe I should just buy a new battery. But then I had a problem. The
snugly fitting NHS battery was wedged in. Even the full force of red Pete’s
feet would not budge it. I felt that God was punishing me for misappropriating
NHS property and sadly decided that the boundary microphone would have to be
ditched, and I should just get myself a clip-on microphone (which was what
TeamSpirit had originally recommended….).
Off I trotted to Currys. “No”, they said, “We don’t do
microphones. You could try Maplins on the Botley Road.” This entailed a trip in the
car, but, after standing for 10 minutes in a queue while the extraordinarily
helpful Maplin’s staff explained some complicated electronic device to a
customer, I was armed with my microphone and ready to go. Quick test when I got
home and it worked! Excellent clear signal. So I should be able to make the two
short video clips that I had undertaken to do.
Now my only problem was to perfect a three-minute spiel and
record myself saying it in front of the camera. Well, there was another
problem, which is that my usual weekend appearance is scruffy. I do scruffy
very well. It’s my natural state. But if I was going to be recorded for
posterity, I needed to try and look professional. I realised that only my top
half would be visible, so put on smart top, jewellery and make-up. Husband
wandered in at some point: surprised to see me dressed up but clearly thought I
had just forgotten to change from
track-suit trousers, which says much about my usual level of absent mindedness.
Arranged camera on a stepladder to capture head-and-shoulders region, checked
light levels, sat in chair, breathed in ready to start spiel, and … the phone
rang. Blood transfusion service, wanting me to make an appointment to give
blood. Go downstairs, find diary, make appointment. Start again.
The thing about talking in front of a video for three
minutes is that it’s quite easy to do it for about two minutes, but then you
snarl up. I had two takes that were near-perfect but where I then descended
into gibberish. There was also one take where the top of my head was chopped
off, and another where I forgot to plug in the microphone. But eventually, I
had a version with just a minor stumble in the middle which I decided I could
live with. So now, I just had to import it into my computer. Quick hunt for the
instruction manual, eventually located underneath a newspaper. Cunningly
designed camera has USB connector that you can pull out of slide slot: neat!
You put it in your computer, which allows you to download the software that you
need to edit your video. This gives instructions for yet other software that
you need to find on the web. You download that and restart the computer as
instructed. You then get a cheerful message to tell you that there’s a new
version of your software, and would you like to download an update now. “No I
would not!” I say sternly to the screen, determined to press on now I’ve got
started. I’m confused as to the distinction between the two bits of software,
but eventually manage to download my video. It’s looking good. Except the audio
starts about three seconds before the video. I try again. Same story. I look at
video on the camera: audio and video perfectly synchronised.
Decide I need coffee, but we are out of coffee, so nip
across the road. Weird look from shopkeeper reminds me that I am make-up and
jewellery on top half and tracksuit on bottom half. Coffee in hand, I regroup.
No advice on out-of-sync films in the manual or on the website of the
camera-maker, which is complex, confusing and looks unlikely to resolve my
problems. Try Google. There seem to be
only a tiny handful of people out there who’ve had the same problem, and the
replies they’ve had are not encouraging. One man had shot 20 hours of film
before realising the problem, so I reckoned I was lucky in comparison to him.
One suggestion to him was to get into an editing program that would allow him
to shuffle along the audio track. I
dimly remember using some video editing software in the past that allowed me to
separate the audio and video stream on a file. Hunt through all my software,
and locate Windows Moviemaker. This is encouraging, except it doesn’t seem able
to read mp4 files.
In the back of my mind, there’s a concern that maybe the
problem is due to the microphone. Now, this is what happens to me when I
encounter a succession of obstacles: I start calm and logical, but I then start
to think that there’s a malign force out there chuckling over my misfortunes,
and I lose the plot and move over to magical thinking. If the problem was the
microphone, then my logical brain tells me that the video should be out of sync
when viewed on the camera. But a little voice in my head is telling me I should
try with a different microphone, and so off I go on a futile and time-consuming
exercise. I have another microphone that’s attached to a headset. So I unplug
the recorder from the computer USB port. In response, computer gives me blue
screen of death. Switch off computer. Reboot. Relieved to find it still works
okay.
So I return upstairs to my living room to record two new
brief segments, one with original microphone and one with headset microphone. I
come downstairs, I plug camera into USB port. Blue screen of death returns.
Reboot computer. It won’t start. Realise that this might be due to camera in
USB port. Remove camera. Computer starts OK. Gingerly put camera in USB port.
This time it’s okay, and I download my two trial clips. Both download okay. But
when I play them, I realise there’s a fatal flaw to my test. I recorded clips
with me talking, but did not record my face. So I have no idea whether or not
the audio is in sync with the video.
Upstairs again to re-record. Ultimately, this futile test
confirms that both microphones give an in-sync film on the camera, which
mysteriously transforms into an out-of-sync version on my computer.
I have a faint memory of things called codecs, which
determine how audio and video is converted into a digital form. Maybe I don’t
have the right codecs. At this point, a more sensible test occurs to me. I
should try downloading on to a different computer. Husband who is peacefully
working in his office at top of the house is willing to lend me a laptop, which
I carry to my office at bottom of house. It takes a very long time to boot up,
and once it’s done that, I can’t get the mouse to work. Try pressing buttons
etc. No joy. Further consultation with husband. Decide to replace battery in
mouse. We have batteries, but they are defended by packaging. Further hunt for
scissors. Get battery. Replace battery. Mouse now works. Plug in camera.
Download software. Restart. Get message telling me to download updated software
and decide this may be a good idea, so do that and again restart. This is a
computer that takes a good 5 minutes to boot up and to shut down. Make a cup of
tea while all this is going on. And, joy oh joy, when I have got software
installed and downloaded the video, it works. It is in sync! I have to edit it
to chop off the first and last bits, where I am walking from the camera to the
chair and back, and so I find the manual which explains how to do that, but I’m
in a hurry, as we are going out for the evening, and somehow, I manage to do
the opposite of what I intended, so am left with just the end of the film,
which is a bit I wanted to discard. Still, I think, we’re getting there.
Tomorrow is another day.
A new day dawns. I download the film to husband’s computer
one more time. This time I do succeed in selecting the right portion to save,
and create a file that we’ll be able to download to YouTube. But I’d really
like to back it up on my computer, and there’s a problem. It’s too big to
email, too big for Dropbox, and won’t fit on a memory stick. I used to have
several pocket drives, but I blew up a couple of them by using the wrong power
supply, and the others are at work. Hunt of the house eventually yields a
pocket driving belonging to husband (who is amassing marital points at an
unprecedented rate during this exercise) and transfer the video to my computer.
But when I play it, the audio is out of sync with the video.
Now, although this is disappointing, I’m not sure whether
it’s good news or bad news. The good news is that the file is clearly fine when
played on either the camera or my husband’s PC. So the problem is with my PC
and how it is interpreting the file. So I feel I have to get to grip with
codecs again. The software has actually told me which codecs were used with the
file, and I make a note of them. Googling the IDs leads me to a website that
has oodles of codecs that you can download. A bit more Googling allows me to
find out how to see which codecs are already installed on my machine. But now I
have a quandary. It’s not clear to me that the codec download site is safe, and
a bit more Googling confirms my worries. It seems that you can end up far worse
than you started if you download a dodgy codec. So I have a new idea. I’ll try
the Microsoft site and see what it says about codecs. What it says is possibly the
least helpful advice I have ever seen. It suggests you search on the internet
for the codecs you need, but it then says that it can be really, really
dangerous to download codecs from the internet, and warns you against it.
Well, I think, maybe if I download an up-to-date version of
Moviemaker, it might come with useful codecs. On to the Microsoft site. Yes,
there’s a more recent version of Moviemaker, and I initiate the download
process. But then it demands verification via Microsoft Genuine Advantage. This
rings faint bells as something I decided not to sign up for, having read
reviews that suggested it could slow up your machine. I think that maybe I
should give it a try, but when I try to do so I ultimately get to a website
that explains that the page isn’t working and Microsoft is aware of the
problem.
I decide that, rather than wasting time on a fruitless hunt
for a safe codec, I will shoot one more bit of footage. Once again, make-up,
nice top, pearls. Part of me wonders whether there’s any point to this, and
whether I should not instead adopt the Mary Beard approach of appearing au
naturel. It definitely works for Mary, who is widely adored for her robust
attitude to those who think she should have a make-over for TV. But I decide
that I can’t now change tack, as it would really look weird if one bit of view
had me all glammed up and the next one had the normal scruffy Bishop. The first
two takes are fluffed, but the third is perfect. Except that when I try to stop
the recording, the device is frozen. No buttons at all work, even the off
switch. I’m starting to get emotional but have to try not to cry as it would
just make my makeup run (another good reason for adopting the au naturel
approach). The manual is singularly unhelpful - its advice on problems is
restricted to occurrences such as having one’s finger in front of the
viewfinder. Googling doesn’t help either. All my experiences seem unique to
me - further evidence of the malign
force. Only solution, I guess, is to remove the battery. That restores the
camera to normal functioning, but the last, perfect, take is described as “file
type unknown”.
Back upstairs for yet another session. Eventually manage a
version that seems okay, which I download successfully. And which looks fine on
husband’s laptop but out-of-sync on mine. Thankfully get back into tracksuit,
remove makeup, and decide I will reward myself with a negroni and an episode of
the Bridge.
If these videos do ever get onto the RALLI site, you may
think that I look a bit stressed for someone who’s just doing a three-minute
piece. But now you know the true story.
