Tuesday, August 30, 2005

August

My two priorities were to find solutions to the technical challenges the piece posed and to find a location to film from.

The major technical issue involved the use of time-lapse filming. My initial idea was to make a time-lapse film overlooking the Princesshay development site. The filming would take place over one day and would record one minute of every hour. Whilst some video cameras have a time-lapse capability it is usually very limited and only allows filming of a frame or very few frames at a time. After some searching I came across the shareware software BTVpro which had the necessary adjustable parameters on its time-lapse feature that would allow me to do what I wanted. I made a couple of tests with different cameras (one analogue one digital) out of the window of my house. The results were good, the software worked well but I did need a better camera, one that allowed the digital out signal to work without a tape inserted and without powering down after a few minutes of inactivity. I spoke to both the media centre at the Exeter Phoenix and Digital Cut and it was Digital Cut who had a couple of Sony camcorders that would do the job.

Although the program BTVpro worked well for the video images, whilst in the time-lapse mode it did not record sound so I needed to find a way to record audio independently of the film. I thought that it might be possible using my ipod combined with either a Griffin italk or the Belkin universal microphone adapter combined with a decent microphone. I would then be able to leave the ipod recording for a period of 24 hours (or more). This would obviously require a great deal of editing but it was a possibility. I decided to try the Belkin adapter in combination with an external microphone but everytime I used it it caused my ipod to crash.

I then tried to find some software and came across another shareware program Audiocorder which has the facility to set recording times just like a video recorder – this in combination with an external microphone plugged straight into the powerbook worked fine. Although this did mean that I needed to get hold of another powerbook as I couldn’t run both BTVpro and Audiocorder simultaneously on the same machine.

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