Shooting video and making DVD's

[Ric Landers]

Who'da thunk it! Here I am in the beautiful North Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains with my mobile audio recording operation set up in a 200+ year old Cherokee built log cabin working on Bobby Don Bloodworth and Gopher Broke Band's next CD and I'm getting video work on the side that seems to be morphing into a business on its own. I just finished shooting and editing together a two disc Interactive DVD of an evening at Cooter Brown Emporium in Blairsville, Georgia. My video camera is a high end consumer camera that records to a 40-Gig hard drive and records audio in Dolby 5.1. It is a Hi Def camera and does a decent job on the video and audio but it's a challenge doing a one camera shoot and making it interesting. A three or four pro camera shoot would make things much simpler to edit but at the moment I'm a one man band without those resources. The two disc set I authored via Adobe Encore consists of the first You Tube video I put together for Cooters, a slide show tour of Cooters, and all three sets performed by the band that night. I also created menu and label art for the project that turned out pretty nice. I love Photoshop. Because of the length of the archived music sets I had to go with a two disc set for Keith at Cooters. He will just be using the discs for his own review as we tweak the video that will be posted to his website in the not too distant future. One disc contains the slide show tour of Cooters and the first full set of music. Disc #2 contains the first Your Tube video and the other two sets. The DVD's autoload upon insertion into the player and the content is selectable via an interactive menu. This type of DVD would be a great promotional tool for recording artists and bands. On one disc you could have video of actual performances, slide shows to enhance the story and music samples that a prospective venue organizer could review from any DVD player.

It's cold and snow in the mountains today. The only thing I am really missing about being in Nashville these days is the Old Time and Irish music jams at Fiddle & Pick and NOTSBA. I really miss getting to see and pick with you guys! And I will be by to visit the first chance I have to get back to town.