The Videos

The videos are a result of about a year long "on again / off again" process.

First, we recorded the performances with just an old video tape camera built circa 1990. The camera sat on a tripod in the back corner of the dining room, and someone accidentally thought they were helping when they turned the auto focus on without our knowledge, so every now and then the whole picture blurs out, but it's what we have to remember it all by.

So the show hung out as just a few video tapes moving from place to place and box to shelf for years and years until in 2008, thinking since VCR's were ceasing to exist, and any day now I could lose the tape to an old tape eating machine, I decided to go out and buy one of those combo DVD/VCR players that will dub old tapes to DVD. As it turns out, this process takes a little while, and then you have a DVD of an old video tape with only track and no menu.

So then I bought a new computer, which I thought would be a good new machine to do video editing with. Turns out Vista sucks, and both my hard drives crashed within 45 days. So, after doing some rebuilding, I finally have a machine that seems to not be burning up the hard drives. So then I bought a piece of crap DVD ripper program. After fighting this garbage for a few weeks I finally bought another DVD ripper program, which worked just a little bit better. I'm still not happy with those purchases, but they managed to get me to the point where I could start editing video.

So I thought to myself, well Vista comes with video software, maybe it's like Mac's iMovie, and I will be able to start putting everything together. After cutting up all the scenes, and putting titles on them, and using the Vista DVD maker, I realized that those programs suck something awful as well. Everything looked like crap, so it was back to the drawing board.

So plan B... I bought the Vegas Movie Studio at Office Depot one day, and started cutting up the scenes, removing the dead time for scene changes in between, putting on some titles, and eventually had the whole first show put together. Using the DVD software that came with the Vegas stuff, I was able to make a pretty decent looking menu and finally get a DVD I could be happy with.

Then I decided I wanted to do bonus footage of after the New Years Eve party for a second disk. Every time I tried to render the file, my computer would crash. I mean, it wouldn't warn me or anything. It just turned off. So getting frustrated, I made one last ditch attempt with the Windows DVD maker, and got the file to burn. So the second disk is not as fancy, but at least it works. I've got about 30 minutes of the camera rolling in the corner of all the New Years Eve partygoers.

Then came the uploading to YouTube part, that took several attempts, and a few more computer crashes to get everything up there, but finally... actually as of an hour ago at the time of this writing, everything is up on YouTube, and now we have everything organized in the menu to the right ---->

You can watch everything online. If there's somebody out there who attended the shows, and would like a DVD, I've got those as well. Just give me a shout with an address, and I can mail you one.

OK, have fun, enjoy.

Shawn Millar - 07-25-2009