OK, I admit it. I'm an audio guy. At least, I used to be. I much prefer to work in the medium of audio. Maybe it's because I'm a musician. Maybe it's because I have a body made for radio. Whatever the reason, it's all changing.

It's not like I'm new to video. I have produced videos, even full-length movies. If you would recall the .NET Rocks! movie, in which Richard Campbell, Rory Blyth, and I recorded a .NET Rocks! episode on video as well as audio. It wasn't the prettiest, but it was a good start. It was done with Mini DV cameras and Adobe Premeire and it took a LONG time to render. Maybe that's why I prefer audio. Rendering goes by pretty quick.

I've also done lots of dnrTV episodes. These are screen video, and not as challenging as live-motion video, but still, I figured out how to do it well. My brother Jay has edited most of the dnrTV episodes. He's actually very talented at putting videos together. He did a wedding video (on DVD no-less) for our cousin that actually made me well up, it was so good.

Well, I've decided to jump head-first into the hi-def video pool by producing two real videos for real customers. The first will be for StrangeLoop Networks, and the second will be for Developer Express. Seeing as how the first shoot is next week in New York, a couple days ago I figured I'd better stop procrastinating and buy the gear so I could get familiar with it. This is the story of what came out of my first tests.

The idea is to start with two cameras, and work my way to three. The cameras have to shoot in hi-def, specifically 720p (1200x720). The reason is that Silverlight video, which I plan to use heavily, can push out 720p streams as easily as Flash pushes out the standard-sized stuff.

The cameras also have to be really good quality. I don't want to use a cheap handheld. Those things might do hi-def, but the optics are crappy, not to mention the fact that one strong gust of wind and it's over. No thanks. I'll pick one with really good optics and a bit of heft to it.

So at the suggestion of my friend, Scott Stanfield, I purchased two Panasonic HVX200 pro camcorders. These will not only do 720p but also 1080p and also the lower-res standard formats. They have built-in audio preamps with phantom power, gobs of I/O options including XLR inputs, and superior optics. They use DV tapes, but also P2 cards, which are these PCMCIA cards that contain flash memory. Scott says they are awesome, but expensive.

The camera itself was also a bit on the expensive side. The best deal I could find was at Fotoconnection.com, but watch out. The page you land on from Google is for the European version, but they don't tell you that until you're on the phone with them verifying your address, etc. "Where in Europe are you going?"  Yeah right. Nice one, guys. The US version is another 600 bucks or so, but still a good deal.

I also got a couple shoulder supports. This is critical for doing any handheld shooting when your camera is of medium heft. You just can't hold it that long without getting the wobblies. To the mix I added three 1000 watt diffusor light boxes. These are basically 1K watt halogen bulbs in a box with a white diffusor over it so the light isn't so harsh.

So I got all that stuff delivered yesterday, minus the P2 cards. I figured I would use DV tapes to start. Except that you can only record in 720p to a P2 card. Looking them up on the web, I see you can get a 16GB card for 900 bucks. That holds about 20 minutes of 720p video. You can get two of them, and that gives you 40 minutes. Hmmm.... kinda expensive.

Next I found this little gem of a box, which records from the firewire port onto an internal hard drive in all the formats supported by the camera. People were swearing by them in the comments, and best of all, a 100GB version is only 1800 bucks and it yields 100 minutes. Getting better.

Trying to understand how it works, it occurred to me that it's just taking the raw video feed and doing all the recording all within the box. Guess what? So does a computer. All I need is a laptop and the right software.... Lawrence Ryan was sitting in the studio with me while I was looking this stuff up online, and he stumbled onto Adobe On Location, a software package that records right to hard disk in a variety of formats, and has a very slick UI. They have a 30-day eval version. Great! I downloaded it and it worked immediately. If I'm going to spend $1800 on storage for the camera, I'll buy a laptop and portable hard drive!

So... that brings us to the test video. I wanted to record myself playing drums. I wanted to record the audio with Adobe Audition using the standard studio multitrack setup, and also record audio with the video camera (so I could sync the nice clean mixed version up to the video later). This didn't work because after installing either On Location or the Expression Encoder (I don't know which!!) Adobe Audition stopped working. It would hang in multitrack mode. This is a bug I've seen before, and the solution is to reinstall. Yep. Something got stomped on.

So, I recorded this video with one camera, using the built in microphone (which doesn't sound bad, actually). I used two of the lights.. one on either side at different angles. The AVI file was over 2GB!

First I used the Windows Media Encoder to turn it into a WMV. This step is necessary, because the camera actually spits out 960x720 (a DVCPRO HD format), and the Media Encoder stretches it out to 1200x720, and it doesn't look bad.

Next I run it through the Microsoft Expression Encoder, which turns the WMV into a streaming Silverlight website. The first time I tried encoding the AVI directly with Expression Encoder it didn't work. I'm going to try it again. It would be great if I didn't have to first make a WMV.

The result of all this (at about 4AM) is the following video:

http://libra.franklins.net/silverlighttest/

So what next after these two videos? Well, I'm toying with the idea of creating a monthly (at first anyway) live music show from Pwop Studios. There is an awesome indy music scene here, and plenty of great bands to showcase. After that, who knows.... so much to do and so little time... I guess I'll have to give up another week of sleep.