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Finally returned them video tapes.

VHS tapes for some reason seem to seep into a lot of my earliest memories. I so vividly watching repeatedly recordings my dad had made of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, constantly rewinding the 100 metre semi finals, seeing Dwain Chambers saunter backwards into his blocks, neck strained, muscles contracting in disturbing ways. Or what about the Walking With Dinosaurs series? Wow! What a landmark documentary. That was my religion for a great number of years.


There's a certain graininess, imperfections which give a nostalgic character to those tapes. Maybe I just feel old compared to the rest of my peers (bar a few perhaps). Like do they even know what a VHS tape is? Would they remember Video Ezy and giving mum that longing face of 'Please let us borrow this movie for the weekend'? Days before Netflix and uTorrent were tough.


Ironically, here I am harping praise on expired technology in a blog about Technology in Music Education (#SCMTME) and how modern contemporary technology can make educating better. But analogue nostalgia is totally a thing! And smarter people than I have capitalised on just such a phenomenon, creating apps like Huji Cam and VHS Cam to make your 2020 iPhone 11 just as expired as your dad's then state-of-the-art JVC GY-X2BU.


...


This week in #SCMTME we tackled video editing in Premiere Pro. The main purpose was to familiarise ourselves with several crucial techniques used often in video editing namely:


Screen Capture

Adding Graphics

Layering


Layering was perhaps the trickiest as Premiere Pro can't separate visual and audio from the same source. So if you wanted to use just the video but not the audio recording (or vice versa), some roundabout techniques must be employed.

  1. Firstly you have to cut your recording into editable sections

  2. Then by changing the opacity and/or volume of your various sections, you get your desired layers

  3. Profit.

  4. This is really confusing as just words. Hope these screenshots make it easier to understand.

OK. So bit of a confession. Those fx's are where changes to opacity and volume were done, and in that highlighted section, I fucked my line up so I reduced the decibels to -96.0, basically rendering it silent. See if you can here it in the actual video...(it's at 0:30 when the static disappears lol)



Here's the thing though, and coming back to the beginning of this blog which kinda seemed to trail off into nothing (sorry), media reality doesn't exist. Everything that has been produced and reproduced, edited in some way to create a truth that the creator wants to project, differs from the objective truth of the event (although Nietzsche might argue that that doesn't exist either). Whether it's an app which makes your life appear to be from the 80's even though you're 13, or muting your embarrassing verbal fluff, or even just rewinding a VHS tape to make athletes move backwards, is reality not just a construct of what one wants to show and what another wants to see?


In saying that, I found everybody's videos this week to be hilarious fun, showcasing different sides of their personalities. There were a huge range of videos made too, most funny, some educational, and some which were both. Go check out Kyra's video on her blog. She demonstrates how video editing can be used in a properly educational way, without being dry, or losing sight of what she considers authentic.


Bye.

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