Saturday, September 13, 2008

Wilford Brimley Swallowed a Frog

I finished my first Wilford Brimley - Conan O'Brien-esque video. I'm not going to mention how long it took me. I was following this tutorial I found.


First off, I obtained Adobe Premiere Pro 3.0 for some reason. The tutorial calls for 6.5. Needless to say, the screens are very different. So, I spent a good bit of time translating the 6.5 steps to 3.0.


Secondly, I have Macromedia Fireworks, while the tutorial calls for Adobe Photoshop. Not a big deal here. They are pretty much the same thing.


The big problem I ran into was my webcam. The video and audio was off by a second or two. So, I tried seperating the video and audio from inside Premeire. This involved starting the video a wee bit after the audio. Playing it by ear, making endless fraction of a second adjustments. Finally, I was able to sync them to my satisfaction. I was ready to export it as an avi file.


"Error compiling movie". Sigh. Apparently, Premiere didn't like the way I chopped the audio and video. Oh well. I searched around a bit and came across some freeware to sych audio and video. Virtualdub, in case you ever run into the same problem. I synched it up and saved as avi, so far so good. I put the avi in Premiere and played it. Somanabitch! Still out of synch! So, I went back into Virtualdub and delayed the video even more. I started out the day with video playing a couple of seconds before the audio started. Now I had the audio starting a couple of seconds before the video started. Que sara sara. I plugged it into Premiere and it was synched up almost perfectly! Weird. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just glad it worked, and am willing to forget that there is no logical reason why.


So, here it is. I'm not completely happy with it. The lips are too pale and a little disproportionate to his face. Not a bad first effort though. Well, overlooking the fact that I made him sound like Sling-blade just swallowed a frog. Ummmm Huuhhhmmm.



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