It’s BBC 2 you want…

I felt it was time for an update of my 2008 showreel as the network globes in particular were a mortal embarrassment to me and I also hadn’t “distressed” anything on the old version as, back in 2008, I didn’t know how. I’ve thoroughly picked Rory Clark’s brains since then!

The Flash was exported out as PNG sequences for processing. The film effect was done using the MSU Old Cinema plug-in in VirtualDub and the MLT Old Film plug-in in Kdenlive. I also used The GIMP in batch mode with some Scheme scripts I wrote to add some “glow”.

I found Kdenlive to be an excellent and extremely capable off-line editor but cutting to music was hard as what you saw in the application didn’t always reflect what you saw in the finished video. I’ve found out that this was not a problem with Kdenlive – apparently it’s due to the various bits of the Fedora 15 audio stack not talking to each other nicely. Whatever the cause, it meant I had to edit the whole of the last thirty seconds by rendering to video, adjusting and then re-rendering as the timing shown in the time-line was at least a second adrift of the finished video by then! Therefore the cutting isn’t as tight as I’d like in places.

The captions were all “distressed” using The GIMP. I’m still a bit hit and miss at doing this but I’m very pleased with the Lancashire and Central Scotland IBA Transmitters In Service captions.

Please go to the Barclay James Harvest home page and buy a copy of Grim by Maestoso if you like the music. The song is called “Location Location Location”.