Video of Unsilent Night San Francisco 2006

I edited a short video of last night’s Unsilent Night event in San Francisco, where New York composer Phil Kline organized a mobile boombox orchestra that did a big loop through The Mission. Several hundred people showed up, either as a participant or to just enjoy the sound. Those with some kind of music player were given a cassette, CD or MP3 with the music that Phil provided for this event.

Oh yeah, even though this is video, it’s really the sound that’s the star of the show, so I recommend watching this one with headphones on. Bravo to Phil and his crew for providing a truly awesome experience and some lovely holiday cacophony (as in sound, not the underground prankster group, although this is right up their alley).

This is the first time I have shoot video in years, so I figured this would be a good event for my indoctrination into the world of video blogging. A few hours before the event picked up a Sony HDR-HC3, which is my first HD camera (I’ve been wanting to buy one for a while). My initial experience with this camera has been great. It did really well in low light, the onboard microphone picked up the sound quite nicely and it is very compact. My last camera was a Sony VX-2000 MiniDV, which was really nice, but a much larger camera.

I thought I would keep things simple with this first video, so I just did a quick edit using iMovie. It’s my first time using that program and I must say that it is quite easy to edit with, plus it can handle HD which is great. I have Final Cut Pro, but it will take me a little while to ramp up on it, but I’m sure it will eventually by my editor of choice. The last non-linear editor I used was Media 100 back in the late 90’s, but that was on a system that I rented by the hour. It’s very liberating to be able to edit on a personal computer on your own time…for free. Of course with the explosion of online video services, it’s so much easier to get your video out there, not to mention that fact that there is now a huge audience for video shorts, which is a perfect format for things like Unsilent Night and many of the other stuff that I would document.

Oh yeah and now I finally have a chance to try out the various online video sharing services, like Blip.tv, which is where the embedded video on this blog post is being hosted. I’ve also uploaded it to Revver, YouTube and Google Video.

Oh hey, a special thanks goes out to Freevlog, which has been a great video blogging resource for me. It is a must for any new video blogger, in fact Michael Verdi and Ryanne Hodson, recently wrote a book on the subject, Secrets of Videoblogging.

UPDATE: Hey guys, does anyone have any tips on how to improve the quality of the video that ends up on Blip.tv and Revver? In iMovie I used the export movie to iPod, but the titles came out a bit choppy and the video is not quite as good as is in the original .m4v file. I know that some of this is due to the compression used by the video services to reduce file size, but is there something I need to do with the file pre-upload, especially when it comes to the titles?