Greg Wood is a veteran magician based in Winnipeg that I have known for a few years through my involvement in the Magic Club of Winnipeg. He is a regular house magician at Toad Hall Toys which is where you can buy magic supplies in town.  I went by “Toad” one day to pick up a few supplies and Greg and I started chatting about a media project he was having done.

He had a one hour show taped at Calvary Temple in front of a live audience that he wanted to have edited together and packaged, he asked if I could put it together for him. Yes we can!

We did 2 versions of his DVD; one version with a Gospel message included and another without the Gospel message that ended up being a bit shorter. In addition to the DVD’s we did :30 and :90 promos that he’s using on his website, FaceBook and YouTube.

I ended up creating 3 separate videos, a 6:45 length feature about the Training Expo which had sections for the Stereoscopic 3d presentation, the Ben Davis Action workshop and the Music for Productions and Composers sessions; a 30 second version was also made. In addition, a separate video was made about the Poor Man’s Process workshop that took a week after the training expo.

FTM asked to have a version delivered that could be given to broadcasters and other media outlets when doing some promotional work. So in addition to a standard definition DVD, they were given MPEG4 files with the H.264 codec, both a SD version and a 720p version, which is the resolution of the original video. In addition, unmixed versions were supplied that had no graphics like name keys and lower thirds and also no music, just actualities and natural sound on separated channels.

Usually when completing projects I would lay them tape in this manner, with both a mixed and unmixed version, but with the advent of more tapeless acquisition formats I find myself less inclined to master to tape as well, instead I will keep hi-rez and medium-rez data versions, it really does depend on the project though, some long form projects I will still put to tape, and I imagine I will work it like that for a while still.

The full videos will be up on the Film Training Manitoba website soon.

It’s usually bitter-sweet to finish a project, espeically one that is worked over such a long stretch of time. It’s nice to ahve a complete project that I can publicize, it’s nice to get that last payment, but it’s sad to leave the people you’ve been working with on it.

Thanks to Karen, Tej and Charnjit for a great experience in producing this project and helping me learn about Punjabi people and culture in the process.

It turned out to be a pretty simple process, with a lot of material to manage though. It’s a good thing that I have a second system that I use for encoding because to get 4+ hours of material ready for DVD takes 16 hours of processor time!

Below are a few screen shots from the DVD. I’m glad that I got to be a part of this process, maybe I’ll be seeing some of the actors from this workshop on the big screen in the near future.