Hi, strayslack:
This is a fair question! Like a cook preparing a meal in a restaurant kitchen when you're hungry
, it helps (sometimes!) to understand what's going on behind the scenes.
This is the editing process - and this is not even going into all the other things that are happening, like talking on the phone to George Green and Bill Deagle (and editing and posting those) and troubleshooting issues on the new Forum.
We shot two hours of tape on three cameras, and that has to be uploaded in real time. So that's six hours. Then the audio and video clips need to be arranged on what's called a 'timeline'
and all sorted out for a giant cut-and-paste. Sometimes there are issues with transitions and audio synchronization which take both of us to work on.
When we have a 'rough cut' which Kerry has assembled, then I go through it in real time (two hours plus) making notes of all the small things that need tweaking, like color matching (brightness/contrast), transitions that are not quite right, etc. Then when we're both happy with the final product (still existing as a giant file in a Mac application called
Final Cut Pro), it has to be exported in both MOV and MP4 formats. This can take several hours.
After that I extract the MP3 audio for separate posting, and convert the MOV to WMV using a third-party converter. We then have to create the new website page using
Dreamweaver and draft the descriptive text until we both agree on it.
Finally, we have to upload the various files (which are quite large) to Google, YouTube, and to our own Camelot server. With Google and Youtube they then have to process the file internally and that can take a further 6-8 hours before the video is 'live'.
Then we make the announcement that the video is posted.
From Monday evening to early Thursday morning for a video like this to be released is a record for us. We're both exhausted.
Your question was a useful opportunity for us to explain what happens behind the scenes! Each time we shoot a video it takes days of work after that to get it all published. Now we have to work on Bob Dean!
Enjoy
Very best wishes to you -
Bill