Pages

The 2011 Video

I hadn't planned on making a 2011 video at all, with one in 2008 and one in 2010, I had planned pass this year and make it officially a biennial thing (I had to look up the word "biennial", be proud or something, won't you?)

A few people though, mentioned that they were looking forward to this 2011 video -- a video that, up until a couple weeks ago, didn't exist and I had no intention of bringing into existence.

A couple weeks ago though, I looked through what footage I did have from this year (I didn't think I'd filmed much, because I hadn't planned to make the video). It turned out I had a lot more than I thought I did, so I started editing it together.

It didn't take too long, and I uploaded the first copy a full week before it was due to be released.

Then I decided to edit it a bit, swap some stuff around, put in some more footage and then I reuploaded it. Which is where the problems began.

The songs were copyrighted. Fair enough. But whereas they were fine the first time I uploaded them, it now said I couldn't embed the video - that it could only be watched through the official youtube website.

Fuck.

This happened at about 1am. It was due to be online by 12noon.

I started another upload, this time to Dailymotion - each upload was taking around 5 hours. So I went to sleep. I woke up at around 6am and found that the video had failed to upload. I re-exported it, this time to a smaller file size and started the upload again. Only to find, at 8:30am, that it had failed again. I went back to sleep, setting my alarm for 10:30. Having set it to go yet again.

Failed. At 10:30am. I set it going again, but also set about finding an alternative method of getting it online. I went back to youtube and downloaded the video using keepvid.com. Then I had to figure out how to add the flash player to my site.

I found a free solution eventually and then had to upload the flash file to my website. All of which took until 11:45am.

I set the original upload to youtube going at around 7pm Christmas Eve and it took until 11:45am Christmas Day to have it viewable.

Over 16 fucking hours to get a fucking video online and watchable?

A VIDEO THAT I WASN'T EVEN MEANT TO BE MAKING!

Sake.

I'm reasonably happy with the result of it all, but I'm not as happy as I was with the 2010 video. Other seem to like it though. Which is good.