My life has become an assembly line.
The addition of full, archived video of both General Assembly chambers to Richmond Sunlight has left me in a constant state of video conversion. If it were just a matter of keeping current, it wouldn’t be so bad, but I have to process all of the video going back to the beginning of this year’s session. It’s a seven step process, and four of those steps are entirely automated, but require that I pass the video between each of those steps. I feel like I’m spinning plates.
It goes a little like this:
- Insert DVD, copy video files (between 700MB and 2GB of data) onto the LaCie F.A. Porsche 320 GB external Firewire hard drive that I have dedicated for this purpose.
- Convert DVD (VOB) file to an MPEG-4 in Squared 5’s excellent MPEG Streamclip (free), using Apple’s QuickTime MPEG-2 codec ($20). This produces a 500MB – 1.5GB file.
- Hack off the seconds or minutes of video resulting from the camera rolling before and after the meeting has actually begun. This is done in QuickTime Pro ($29).
- Convert MPEG-4 to a 15 fps, 22kbps 321×240 H.264 QuickTime file, with audio as AAC, 32kHz sample rate and 96kbps bit rate. Also done in QuickTime. This produces a 130-700MB file.
- Upload resulting file to Google Video via the Google Video Uploader (free).
- Enter the relevant descriptive information for each video on Google Video’s web interface.
- Enter the same descriptive information within Richmond Sunlight’s own database.
Thankfully, the three conversion steps can all be batched, so I don’t have to wait each video to complete each step singly. But I do need to move each batch of videos between each step, leaving me with a constant background concern of whether my computer is, at any given moment, using its full processing power and bandwidth to convert and upload videos. It’s the first thing that I do in the morning and the last thing I do before bed. As a result, my computer (a 1.66GHz dual processor Mac mini with 2GB of RAM) has been unbearably slow for the past two weeks. Our home internet connection is all but useless for upstream data transfers. Just typing this blog entry — waiting for each keystroke to render on the screen — is an exercise in frustration at times.
What makes all of this so ridiculous is the redundancy of it all. Each chamber in the legislature already captures video digitally. They’re having to convert this video into DVD format to burn it, which I then take home and convert back to a standard digital format. It’s not quite Sisyphian, but it feels a bit like it. I could easily be made irrelevant to this process, and I hope that the House and the Senate will see next year that they should just go ahead and do this themselves. I look forward to being made useless.
I am definitely not requesting this or trying to add to your workload at all, but I am curious if the video includes committee hearings?
Nope. Would that it did. The legislature doesn’t record committee hearings (that I know of). But, hey, if anybody knows otherwise, I’d love to hear about it!
Well, somebody was recording with a camera when I testified at a Senate committee meeting and it wasn’t press and it looked like legislature staff, but that is my only experience of it and I don’t know more than that. Maybe someone else who has spoken to committees more often knows.
The Democratic Party of Virginia sometimes records committee and subcommittee meetings. I suspect you saw one of them.
Are you comfortable uploading all that stuff to Google Video? We upload our videos there at Charlottesville Tomorrow, but part of me wonders how viable that strategy is going to be long-term. We have no plans to do anything different given the affordable nature. (free)
I am comfortable doing that, but only because I’ll also be uploading all of them to Richmond Sunlight as QuickTime for people to download directly. Our host provides plenty of storage, and I’ll route the downloads through Coral Cache, which should take care of bandwidth concerns.
That’s good to know. I never could get that Coral Cache thing to work out for cvillepodcast.com.
Thank you for doing all this.
Sounds to me like Virginia owes Waldo a Mac Pro.
Heh. I don’t think the state will be taking up a collection anytime soon. :) But, yes, that would accelerate the process quite a bit!