A very full day but a good one, generally I think.
I had a panicky night, wondering whether a song with the title of Hitler in High Heels would somehow be banned or problematical. Would the title offend Hiterlians with the insinuation of transvestitism, and at the same time invent a completely new song!? Of course the word hitler here is used as a noun not a proper noun, which made me I wonder if nouns which stem from the name of a historical character should be capitalised. I toyed with alternative words, but the very sentence Hitler in High Heels has a lot of alliterative and visual power. It would be a shame to lose it.
I decided to submit the album for release as it is.
I wanted to work on some song lyric videos so I set up my filming room, the famous ArtSwarm studio, and did some tests with my new camera. My old Canon 1100D could only film in HD, 720p. How times have changed. Once 640x480 was cutting edge, then 1280x720 - how short lived that seemed to be. Now 1920x1080 is perhaps most common and far better visually. 4k (or 8k or higher) seem just excessively silly, especially as screens are getting smaller.
Anyway, my new camera can cope with 1080p (I say cope, this is the lowest setting, it can record 4k - sillyness! I can't afford those wasteful bytes), and has a built-in mic socket so I spent the first few hours just testing different audio options. Plugging in via headphone extension cable produced weird digital noise. I then used an XLR cable and an adaptor for the last section, which was better. Then I tried by using the camera on battery and this was better still - so perhaps the noise is coming from the PSU. But, all of this was still noisier and worse quality than my old system of recording audio separately on my Zoom H4. So, after a few hours, I decided to do that. For a first test of new equipment, it's important to try every option. As before the audio is a different length (0.04% longer) than the film - as though time itself is different for each machine. This too took a test to measure and verify.
Then I toyed with the camera settings themselves. This one has manual settings so I can actually set the f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed for camera filming, amazing. So I've done this, which stops the annoying fade up and down of glare in different circumstances. This testing also took some time.
Then, I recorded the lyrics videos for Secret Electric Sorcery. The recording took hardly any time, most of the work was preparation (printing lyrics etc.) and later file conversion, which is achingly slow. I became anxious about not getting things quite right. Every word needs to be perfect.
I also worried about whether these were necessary or just a distraction from the other videos on my site, but, then, they don't take long, and are perhaps better than no video. Lyrics are important to me, and they can be missed in the song. I also need, I've decided, to add subtitles, which is an extra step. These are done 'manually' making the text and mask images in Photoshop and noting down the frame numbers for typing into AviSynth. It's all very time consuming.
But the quality is very good. I'm now thinking, in my mad perfectionism, that I should delete the existing Dusty Mirror videos and remake those in 1080p with subtitles too. I should, might, be able to do this for both albums, AND The Myth of Sisyphus, AND Nightfood, in one week. I will need to be superhuman (a humanist one, not a Hitlerian or Nietzschean one) to manage this.
Onwards we roll our heavy rock.
