Movie making

I did some movie making last week, and for the first time, added some music to my movie. I've never done that before, since I generally produce 20-30 second clips of the latest antics of the little monkey for the rest of the family. Music on that type of clip is redundant.

My movie though was over 30 minutes long, rather than 30 seconds, and it required music as it was a ski movie. I selected half a dozen clips and went to stick them into the movie. It was pretty easy, except that about the only format of music that you can't use is a clip from iTunes. Since I have imported all my CDs into iTunes, I had to go and dig a pile of CDs out of storage and then import them using Media Player. When was the last time you played a CD? Ours are all sitting under the coffee table, and they have not been touched since we moved house. Next time we move, I am going to stick the whole lot into plastic boxes and put them into storage.

Anyway, after stuffing around for a few hours, I had some songs to use. I inserted the music, and then went to adjust the volume of each track.

That's when I got annoyed.

My movie has some talking in it - people talking about how cool a run was and that kind of thing - and I didn't want the music to drown it out. It was at that point that I discovered that if you adjust the volume on the sound track, you adjust it for the entire length of that particular sound clip. I only wanted to drop the volume for 10 seconds or so, but the bloody software reduced it for the entire 3 minutes.

I figured that one way around it would be to slice the sound clip into three segments - a loud segment, a short quiet segment that would be the length of the bit of movie where people are talking, and then a loud bit at the end when people are just skiing.

But who wants to go to that level of trouble when splicing together a dozen clips of people skiing down a hill? Bugger it. In some segments, you can hear people talking but the music is quiet, and in other bits you can't hear a thing that people are saying.

This modern media stuff is not all it's cracked up to be.