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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2013 7:19:37 GMT -5
A good idea, Sydney Grew! Of course, what I would prefer, I suspect, would be a video of the performers themselves, although I have pondering why opera, for example, is not particularly successful on the idiot box (televison), whereas soap opera clearly is. BBC One (television) - EastEndersMy own suspicion is that opera does not translate that well to the medium of the small screen (television), although it works better on the Big Screen (cinema). At the Barbican on Saturday, for example, I was chatting to members of the cinema audience about ' Parsifal', live from the Met. Barbican - Film - MET Opera Live: ParsifalMy experience over many decades at the Proms is that live in the Royal Albert Hall is not necessarily best. Radio and television both have their merits, so it can be interesting to experience the same performance through many different media. Any preferences?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2013 7:29:39 GMT -5
Upon closer inspection, the "You-Tube" business is unsuitable. They say: I haven't got one and do not intend ever to get one. But never mind - I will still go ahead and make a test file, because there are a number of other "video hosting services" without that restriction upon duration for the telephonically challenged. One I have looked at is French: www.dailymotion.com - it may or may not have too much advertising, but otherwise it appears to have all the requirements, including the possibility of down-loading via "YTD video downloader," and no requirement that listeners log in. (Shorter items can still use the You-Tube thing as well.)
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2013 8:47:57 GMT -5
Of course, if you had family, or a friend, or a neighbour, with a mobile phone, Sydney Grew, they might be able to help you out! 3G mobile phones are pretty ubiquitous these days!
I should perhaps confess that I rarely carry a mobile phone, I prefer a laptop, but I do, on occasion, borrow additional hardware from colleagues, in order to overcome such technical challenges!
I would suggest that you try and do a test YouTube broadcast of less than fifteen minutes' duration. A short piece of classical music, like, for example, the Allegro movement from "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" is quite popular on YouTube.
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Post by neilmcgowan on Mar 9, 2013 3:57:52 GMT -5
I have pondering why opera, for example, is not particularly successful on the idiot box I think there are several reasons. i) We are - subconsciously - used to a very high level of directorial and cinematographic work on television. Audiences barely notice the subtelties of camera-work, intercutting, panning, etc. Successful opera relays are filmed the same way (ie with careful planning and filming, followed by post-production montage etc). Simply pointing a camera at an opera production is insufficient - yet it still happens remarkably frequently. ii) A domestic environment - with all its distractions and blandishments - is generally unsuitable to watching any kind of serious broadcast. It takes great discipline to ignore the telephone, request one's cohabitees not to wander in and start conversations, to go to the loo only at breaks in the transmission, and avoid making trips to the fridge in the slower-paced moments. For baroque operas, however, one should probably flirt with orange-sellers during the recitativo sections, not bother to listen to the overture at all, and attempt to send emails backstage to those performers whom one finds arousing )
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 4:37:27 GMT -5
Opera can certainly work in the cinema, Neil McGowan, although possibly not as straight (or gay) opera. In 2011, the Royal Opera House cinema season counted down their top 20 films featuring opera. Why not take a look at the films that made it in between 20 and 16, 15 and 11 and 10 and 6, Sydney Grew? For the record, in the link below is the final part of the countdown, featuring among others Bugs Bunny as Brünnhilde. Top comes ' The Shawshank Redemption'(1994), directed by Frank Darabont and featuring ' Le nozze di Figaro'. Royal Opera House - Top films featuring opera 5-1Wikipedia - The Shawshank RedemptionWrongly convicted for the murder of his wife and her lover, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) gives comfort in the face of adversity to his fellow prison inmates by breaking into the warden’s office and playing the beautiful ' Sull’aria…Che soave zeffiretto' from ' The Marriage of Figaro'. Single-handedly stopping everyone the prison in their tracks (exemplified with a stunning crane shot of the yard), Dufresne ended up in solitary for the stunt. Still, it was worth it – friend Red (Morgan Freeman) testifies; “It was like some beautiful bird flew into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments every last man at Shawshank felt free”. Ironic, as the duet features duplicitous love letter to expose the infidelity of Count Almaviva… Out of interest, Neil McGowan, what is your favourite opera moment in film?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 7:12:04 GMT -5
. . . i) We are - subconsciously - used to a very high level of directorial and cinematographic work on television. Audiences barely notice the subtelties of camera-work, intercutting, panning, etc. Successful opera relays are filmed the same way (ie with careful planning and filming, followed by post-production montage etc). Simply pointing a camera at an opera production is insufficient - yet it still happens remarkably frequently. . . . Actually I disagree rather - I find that television has deteriorated over the past ten years or so to the point of unwatchability. There are two main reasons: 1) the shaky or restless camera - the sort of thing the B.B.C. produces so often where some explorer or house-restorer has an intimate conversation with the viewer and the scene changes every half second before one could possibly take anything in. And 2) the ubiquitous and omnipresent music (I think the B.B.C. does this as a sop to some hoped-for american sales). My brain is quite incapable of taking in simultaneous music and speech, so of course I simply switch off.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 7:35:36 GMT -5
The New Third updated:
First step: Prepare the master audio file in high quality - I use a wav file at this point.
Second step: Note the timings of the audio file, and prepare accompanying text and pictures.
Third step: Prepare one still image for each different text screen - I use Irfanview to do this. Note that the images must all be the same size: 720 x 480 or perhaps 840 x 480 - I do not yet know which will work best with the various video hosts.
Fourth step: Make a separate video for each different image - I use ffmpeg for this purpose:
Note that "-i" indicates the name of the input image file, "-r" is the frame rate, and "-t" is importantly the duration of each video in seconds - here 10, 40 and 30. "-an" means that there is no audio yet. The output files - vid001.mpg and so on - are of type mpg at this stage because it is a simple matter to concatenate files of that type.
Fifth step: Join all the separate videos together, as in this example:
Sixth step: Convert the above-mentioned high-quality master audio file from wav format to m4a (also known as aac) format. I use the dbPoweramp converter with the Nero plug-in, and an output m4a format with variable bit rate and "quality 0.65, estimated bit rate 250 Kbps."
Seventh step: Use ffmpeg to combine (or "multiplex") that m4a audio file with the video file ("joined.mpg") prepared above, converting the video to h264 format, and outputting the whole in an "mp4" container:
Note the "256k" which is the average audio bit-rate - it does make a difference and should not be omitted, even though the "musicfile.m4a" was originally encoded at that rate. And I have tried higher numbers, but they do not work - in fact they cause a reduction to around 130 Kbps.
Eighth step: With luck, the file "final.mp4" can now be uploaded to some video host where a multitude of interested persons may play it or download it with just a click or two. Before long the New Third may well outshine B.B.C. Radio Three may it not?
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