Video Production – Toronto Graffiti and Street Art
Today I posted a video on my website, and at YouTube and MySpace. The song is a hip-hop tune with a funky beat called “Westside 102″. The video captures some amazing street art in Toronto’s westend around Dundas West / Keele.
I want to share the process with you. First off, I shot this video over the last year, on many different days. I’d walk about, minding my own business, and some stencil art, or graffiti would jump out at me, so I’d snap a still. I learned early on that my Motorola Razr, which I used to shoot the video, has limited memory, so I had to install a little mini SD card. Recently I got the notion that I could shoot video with the phone, and so I started. I knew the video was really low res (176×144) so I thought when I cut it, I’d also drop a few stills into the mix as well. The stills were also taken with the Razr, and I cropped them all to 320×240 which would be the final output size.
To pull it all together I found conversion software called TVC and converted my 3GP captured cellphone video to Mpeg4. Then I started working with Sony Vegas software, which looks like their audio software (Acid) and is just as fun to use. I created a Quicktime video that’s about 16 MB and 4 minutes long. I will do another edit this week, and fine tune the audio settings so it’s compressed but sounds clear and tight.
So far YouTube has given me a ton of hits, but the audio is in mono (their default audio format when they compress to flash files). The best quality stereo file is at my page on MySpaceTV.
