Con-Vulsion level 4: Baltimore Comicon part 3: Stan Lee and John Romita

Originally uploaded to Youtube on June 1, 2013

This video is long overdue. For that, I am sorry. If you saw my update on why there has not been an update, you know that we have had much more important concerns since December, so we have not had a chance to edit.

Furthermore, there were multitudes of problems with the editing process. None of the videos we shot with the camera would come up in Sony Vegas for some strange reason. We had to convert them to another format. The converter we had made them look like ass. I tried another converter, and I, still, could not pull them up in Sony Vegas. I converted one of the files by using the Windows 7 version of Windows Movie Maker, and it let me keep the files in HD. It, also, did not look too bad. I wound up converting them one by one using that. I got them all done, with the exception of the longest piece of footage. I had to transfer that to my laptop and use the Windows XP version of Movie Maker. Unfortunately, that left it in 720x480 instead of HD. I, then, used Sony Vegas to upscale it. It does not look that bad.

The last problem we had with this was that the battery on the camera actually died on us. Because of this, a number of the shots from the con were taken on my cell phone. I figured it is better to have a lesser quality shot than it is to have nothing at all. When the sound and audio quality drop in these videos, it means that you are looking at footage shot from my cell phone. I am sorry about that in advance.

This video should have been an easy edit. All I needed to do was attack the videos, add an intro and add credits. That should have been it, but no. Sony Vegas would have none of it. It absolutely refused to let me render these videos. Every time I would try, it would stall and crash. I looked up ways to fix this. I tried every way I could find. None of them worked. I tried different converters. I tried every single way I could think of to just get this video together, and it took over 10 hours just to get Sony Vegas to not crash during the rendering process. I did it, though. The video is done. If the overall video or audio quality suffered because of this, I am sorry. Just getting Vegas to accept these files was a huge pain in the ass, and I seriously thought about just giving up on this video all together. IT is done, though. Enjoy.

I guess it is fitting that this is the one that gave me the most problems, though. these videos had serious problems to begin with. The first and foremost problem that we had with the footage was that we forgot to bring a tripod. All the footage was shot by hand. I am sorry about that. Secondly, the camera was not fully charged. IT died about 17 minutes into the panel. I did pull out my cell phone and record about 8 more minutes of it with that. The audio and visual quality is lower on that section of the video as a direct result, but it is better than not having it. I stopped recording because recording HD footage was a major drain on my batter. We pulled the camera back out and recorded two more segments about a minute long each. The end result of all of these problems is a video that varies wildly in quality over its run time. Again, I am sorry about this. The audio was quiet and hard to hear. I did what I could with it in Audacity, and you can hear everthing, even if it is not all perfectly clear

For what it is worth, it is finally done. Enjoy what we got of the panel.