Suffocating - Our New Music Video

The band I'm in, Exit Strategy, is made of of three other great friends and we're going on 14+ years at this point. We've come a long way since performing covers to only original material. Well, with sufficient arm twisting we might pop out a cover or two.

The last few years we've tried to goal ourselves with producing at least one music video each year. We're slightly behind but we're close to meeting that goal with our most recent video that was released today.

I recommend viewing on YouTube in HD

Our last two videos which are Don't Ask Me What I Want for Christmas and Shore, were shot using DV cameras against a green screen. All of the footage was brought together using some combination of Premiere Pro and After Effects. Green screen using DV cameras will cause you to pull your hair out (I'm exhibit A for the results of pulling your hair out).

This latest video was a new step for us in a number of ways. I refused to do another green screen video and we wanted shoot in high definition. To accomplish this I used a Nikon D90 to record shots of us performing Suffocating in a studio setting. The studio is our practice location and is in the home of our bass player. I've been photographing with a DLSR for a long time. Shooting video footage with a DLSR was a new experience for me. I love being able to use the wide range of lenses available with my D90. It really opens up options in lighting and creativity. The ability to capture video footage in low light situations as seen in parts of this video is just wonderful. You may notice some exposure flickering during the video and I've now learned how to keep that from happening over on the fstoppers.com forum. That's the thing about creating music videos, you're always learning and there will always be at least one thing you wish you had done differently :-)

I found the editing process with HD footage to be a breeze. Today's 64-bit operating systems with fast processors and large amounts of memory make this as easy as editing SD footage 5 years ago. This experience was so much fun that I'm looking forward to the next video. Gaining some comfort with DLSR video techniques opens up even more options for creativity in the future. Alright guys, we need to get that next song nailed down...

More information about our band can be found here.

Droid and iTunes

Just watched this video and learned a few things about copying iTunes music over to the Droid. Watch the video for more details but here are some things I learned:

• Add the "Kind" column to a view to quickly determine what in your library is protected by DRM. If you see Protected AAC then you know it will not play on the Droid. Note: There are illegal ways to unprotect but another is shown below.
• Once you connect your Droid to your computer, you can drag songs directly from iTunes into the music directory on your Droid. Didn't know about that one...
• iTunes has an option for removing DRM from music you purchased from iTunes. If you click iTunes Store, then on the top right click iTunes Plus, that will open up a page that will provide you with the cost for iTunes to remove DRM. I knew you could purchase non-protected music but I was not aware you could purchase an option to remove protection from an existing collection.