This was a collaboration with the very funny Jim Merritt, a fellow member of the BMI workshop.  The song was our submission for an assignment.  We were to write a charm song for a musical adaptation of “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  This song is for Clarence, the guardian angel, when he gets to Earth.  Perhaps it’s not the most appropriate music for Clarence, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.  And I’m particularly fond of the piano part.

I have lots and lots of home videos. We’re talking hundreds of hours. As time goes on, though, I’m worried that these tapes will deteriorate and I won’t be able to watch them in five or ten years. So, I’ve made it my mission recently to start archiving these things digitally, not just to preserve them, but so my family can watch them fairly easily and actually use these videos as memories.

This is harder than you might even think. My family’s videos span four formats: VHS-C (those chunky little versions of VHS that held about 20 minutes each), Analog 8mm, Digital8 (Sony’s proprietary DV format), and MiniDV.  I’m most concerned about the Digital8 tapes; Sony was the only company to produce or support them, and they’ve moved on now. This means that when the Digital8 decks of the world stop working, my tapes are useless. So, I’m using our aging Digital8 camcorder to start archiving in the mid-nineties since these seem to be the most at risk.

I had to spend a lot of time considering formats for the archive. Native DV video takes up about 14 GB/hour, and at about 300-400 hours of video, I wasn’t ready to commit that much space to the home videos (especially considering we’ll be keeping a backup copy of the data as well). Saving the video in some kind of MPEG2 DVD format seemed silly; DVD is on the way out, and there are better codecs now anyway. What I finally settled on was MP4 files encoded in H.264 (incidentally, the files should be ready to dump onto Blu-Ray without transcoding). True, H.264 is a delivery codec, not an archival or editing one, but I tested out the durability of my settings by recompressing the MP4 files as MPEG-2 for DVD, and there was very little noticeable degradation in the output. I’m happy with my footage being able to survive one generation of recompression.

I’m keeping the video in its native resolution of 720 x 480 interlaced. This presents its own problems, namely that computers and progressive-scan equipment will have to deinterlace and squish the video slightly in order to play the clips back correctly. But in the interest of flexibility in conversion years down the line, this seemed like a good compromise between space, viewability, and quality.

On the subject of audio, it turns out sync is a huge issue when capturing consumer home videos, especially from analog sources. I’m using the Digital8 deck to do the A/D conversion from 8mm, and apparently the audio is passed at 12-bit, 32 kHz. Almost all of my Digital8 and MiniDV footage was also recorded at this setting, apparently. Editing software hates this, and the audio falls out of sync with the picture almost every time. So I’m forced to let Final Cut upsample the audio before touching the captured footage at all.

From there, I’m breaking each tape into days or events (right in Compressor) and saving the MP4 files in the format “YYYY-MM-DD_DescriptionHere.mp4″. I figure even if networked playback systems can’t deal with metadata, this will at least let us sort the events chronologically, and get a vague idea of what we’re looking for.

It’ll be interesting to see if what I’m doing is actually as future-proof as I hope it is. It’s frustrating to think that digital video, perfect copies of bits and bytes, may be susceptible to obsolescence down the line. But we’ll still have the tapes as a line of last defense, and as long as I don’t kill the playback equipment over the course of the project, we’ll never have to use it (and degrade it) again. The process seems ridiculous, but it’s already paying off. As David Pogue of the NY Times coincidentally wrote recently, I’m really enjoying watching the tapes as they’re capturing. And that’s the kind of experience I hope to make possible years from now by having this archive at our fingertips.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.  No, I’m writing about what happened when I first opened the box.  Inside the packaging theres a smaller box which contains all the installation discs for the various components of Logic Studio, and the bundled bonus content.  And sitting right on top of all those discs, was one labeled “Final Cut Pro.”  I kid you not.

It’s not even like this disc looked similar.  Final Cut comes on white-colored discs, Logic on black.  It was the opposite color.  I was distressed at first, so I decided to pop it into the computer just to see how bad a mistake this was.  Confusingly, the software on the disc was indeed Logic Pro 9.  Somehow in manufacturing, they printed this disc with the Final Cut branding, apparently.  So now I’ll own a legitimate install disc that I had to label with a sharpie.

Pictures of all this after the break.

In other news, I’m now involved in the exciting production of Jon Fuller’s new album. I’m playing producer/engineer, and it’s quite the undertaking. So far we’ve got piano and bass, with a drum session tomorrow. Check out his site for more up-to-date blogging about the project.

The way my Bandcamp site is set up, you can download the Ditties, and the other random songs I’ve posted here, under the “album” called “Unfinished Business.”  You can stream and download individual tracks, as well as entire albums there.  And more interestingly for me, if you feel compelled to pay for any of the content there, you can.  That’s right – download all my music for free, or name your own price if you wanna help out.  Also, for you audiophiles, the music is available in a ridiculously varied collection of codecs and bitrates, all the way up to completely lossless.

So go poke around, and let me know if there’s any way you think I can improve the offerings over there (or even if you think I should scrap it altogether).

A big thank you to Bluehost, whose tech support seems to get even better every time I call up.  I’m never on hold very long, and every tech I’ve ever spoken to there has been helpful, knowledgeable, and generally intelligent.  And thank God they keep backups, because I would’ve been in real trouble without them.

In that vein, just a quick PSA.  If you’re running a Wordpress-powered site, make sure to a) always keep a backup of both your Wordpress directory and database, and b) always upgrade quickly to the newest version of the software.  Apparently, a vulnerability in my outdated Wordpress install was probably the root of my woes, and don’t I look stupid now for not having prevented it.  So, please, do better than I did, and keep on top of it.

So, that said, I’m not going to make the claim that Ditty a Day is dead forever.  It’s just on a temporary hiatus, until I find myself with some more steady time to actually devote to making it a regular, ongoing thing again.  Sorry if you enjoyed hearing the ditties – they’re still here, for your repeat pleasure, and there will probably be more in the unspecified future.

In the meantime, though, please enjoy this clip, showing just a little bit of what I have been up to recently.  (And come see the show on November 7, if you’re so inclined!  I’m the MD!)

This is just so cool.  It also means that you can use sampled loop libraries in an entirely different way now.  For instance, I don’t play the guitar, but I’ve got lots of strumming acoustic loops that I can use.  However, these are loops tend to be stock chords/voicing/progressions.  But apparently, you can change all that now, and use the timbre and feel of a sample and mold the pitch independently.  It also means that spot-on guitar track you recorded without noticing the E string was flat is now usable again.  This is blowing my mind.