I couldn't sleep the other night (what's new) so I got up and recorded Steely Dan's "Home at Last" from their amazing 1977 album, Aja (highly recommended in all its forms). I did the vocals and played all the instruments, set up the shots, recorded the audio and video, produced it, and published it using the Microsoft Expression Encoder (SilverLight). The story continues below. 

Click the picture below to watch the video in 1280x720 (Microsoft Silverlight will install quickly if you don't have it).

Click here to watch the low-res Flash version at YouTube.

This was recorded in my studio at Pwop Productions. The studio will be booking (audio and video) soon. Please direct all inquiries to info@pwop.com

Unlike my first experiment with producing hi-def Silverlight videos, this one involved a real multitrack recording and 5 different camera shoots. I used Adobe Audition 2.0 to record the audio, and Adobe On Location to record the video using my latop and an external hard drive. The video was done exactly the same way as in the first experiment.

First I recorded the drum track. My hair was actually dry for that one. What's funny is you can see me getting progressively sweatier as the night went on. The entire recording and initial audio mixdown took only 4 hours, but the lights were hot and I was running a round quite a bit. 

Next I laid down the bass, then the piano, guitar, and finally the vocals. I recorded one main vocal, and two background tracks, and then I doubled each background track and the original vocal on the chorus only.

The drums are a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads, which were expertly set up by John Van Ness at Caruso Music in New London, CT. The Bass is a cheap (but awesome) Samick 5-string through a 1000-watt (I know... excessive) GK rig. The guitar is my modified 1983 Gibson Les Paul Standard with EMG pickups through a BOSS effects unit with stereo outs to two amps, a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier and a Lab Series L5. It makes a nice little sound, doesn't it?  The piano is a Yamaha G2 Baby Grand recorded with a Shure C81 and a Rode NT1000. Nuff said.

Once I got a good audio mix, I brought all the video files and the mixed down audio file into Sony Vegas 7.0 to mix the video. One problem: Vegas doesn't have a codec for DVCPRO-HD, the format recorded by my Panasonic HVX100 camera. A little poking around the web and I found the RayLight DVFilm decoder and snagged it for a $195.

Once I got that working, I had to manually line up the videos to each other, one at a time, and then the audio. Then it was just a matter of doing the edit. Well, there was some kind of memory leak or something, because the RayLight codec gave me an error by rendering a text "something bad has happened" message where there should have been video in the preview window. A few seconds later it bluescreened.

I was able to get back into it. The next time I saw the error, I immediately did a save and exit. After coming back into Vegas all was fine, for a while until it happened again. All in all this happened like clockwork about every 10 minutes.

It took about an hour to render a straight uncompressed AVI with Vegas. It then took about 20 more minutes to encode it with the Expression Media Encoder. If you want to know what kind of machine I'm using, check out this post where I introduced "The Beast."

After listening to the mix in the car I had a couple things to tweak so I got back to the studio and did another mix. This time I used VirtualDub to simply replace the audio in the AVI instead of waiting for Vegas to render it again. I love VirtualDub!

If you're new to Silverlight, it's a new browser technology from Microsoft that, in its first incarnation (1.0) does some serious video. The video I published here is 1280x720 at 29 frames per second, and it streams like flash! The next version of Silverlight will bring the power of Microsoft .NET development to the browser, allowing for rich interactive applications that compile in the browser. Expect Silverlight 1.1 next year sometime. In the meantime, we have a serious web video platform to play with!

I'd like to hear your comments, and I'm happy to answer any questions also. Thanks for watching!