The Bootleggers Have Been Busy!

In case you didn't realize it, There is now a Remember video for every year from 1980 - 2014!  Some years even have multiple videos!  Way to go bootleggers!

You can check out any of the videos by clicking right here.

No news on the next official video yet.  I still haven't started anything, but it's likely to be 2000 or 2001 I'm thinking. But who knows?

Happy Remembering!

Debrief

So, that's that!

This is probably my last post here for a while.  Thanks for coming along for the ride.  I've enjoyed documenting the process here, and maybe I'll do something similar for the next one.

As much as I love it,  I'm planning on taking a break from making Remember videos for now.  I hope you can appreciate the time commitment is enormous for these things and I have some other projects I'd like to spend some time on.

I wish I had more time, or y'know, didn't have to go to work, but that's life...
Keep an eye out for new bootlegs too.  Those guys are improving with every one!

Here's the final stats for R98.
[Note: I didn't start recording my time until I'd completed the research section.]

Final time log:
30hrs - [Estimated time.] Researching and Downloading Content.
28hrs - Mixing the music.
11hrs - Lip syncing the music videos.
51hrs - Mixing the rest of the video content.
=====
120hrs - Total  [Mostly in the early hours of the morning!]

121 Songs
86 Movies
44 TV Shows
65 Video Games
18 Misc
[Unless I counted wrong]

Thanks,
The Peterson

It's done!!!

It's done! Tracklist is up at remembervideos.blogspot.com  Enjoy!

FAQ / Comment Predictions

Not long to go now!   In the meantime, here are a few comments I'm predicting the video will probably receive. [Read: these comments come up on every video!]

Hey,  you left out "my favorite thing!"
Answer #1 - Actually it was there! You must have missed it.
Answer #2 - Sorry 'bout that.  A lot of things don't make it in, or the video would be way too long.
Answer #3 - That thing didn't come out in 98.  This video is based on the year a thing came out.

This video should be called "Remember 1998 in the USA"
My intent is for it to be "Remember 1998 in the English speaking world," but the USA does dominate a lot of English speaking pop culture so I'm not surprised you might think that. I'm not from USA by the way.

So much of this music isn't actually from 1998.
I'm going by the date the singles were released.  Some songs may have already been released on albums or soundtracks previously, and songs that were released late in the year are probably better remembered as part of the following year, but what are you gonna do? It gets complicated. I'm also dealing with things like different release dates in different countries and re-released singles that didn't catch on the first time round. Or I could have just made a mistake. Sorry if that's the case.

The Lion King came out in 1994 you big dummy!
True, but the clip in this video is from the direct to DVD sequel, The Lion King 2 from 1998

Hercules came out in 1997.
True again, but the clip in this video is from the TV series of 1998.

"Other" movie came out a different year.
I might have made a mistake, but hopefully not. Movie release dates are a lot simpler than music release dates, but you still have the issue with different countries.  I usually go with the first English speaking county's release date.

So many feels!
Yep, hopefully. Glad you liked it. I don't really get to experience the rush of seeing it for the first time with fresh eyes unfortunately.

What's the name of the thingy at X minutes?
The full tracklist will be posted over at the remembervideos.blogspot.com website. [Maybe not straight away though.]

Such and such video game was released in Japan three years earlier.
It probably was.  But I'm going by the first release in an English speaking country.

The music in 1998 sucked!
Thank you. Your opinion has been noted if we ever meet in real life.

The music in 1998 was the best!
If you say so. You must hang in different circles to the previous commenter.

So, only a few news events happened and the rest of the year was just music and movies?
This is a pop culture review, not an in depth documentary of everything that took place in 1998. Shallow? maybe. But it is what it is.

There's no way all this came out in one year.
Yeah, a lot more stuff happens in a year than you think, huh!  Actually, even more music, movies, and video games came out than what's shown in the video.

Someone has stolen your video and uploaded it as their own on another Youtube channel!
Yea, that's a bummer. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it as I don't own any of the content in the video anyway. Maybe a few more people will get to enjoy the video that wouldn't have found it otherwise I guess.

Why doesn't this video have "True to Your Heart" and "Take me There" and "The Rugrats movie" and "Mulan." I demand it be so!
Don't panic Harry, you'll just have to wait and see...


So, there you go. I'll See you next post!

Making of: Part 2

Another vid slapped together in a rush so you'd have something else to look at! I'm actually a lot further on than this footage would lead you to believe.  I'm predicting we'll have a finished video sometime in January [or Feb at the latest].  Happy New Year btw!  Time spent on just the video mixing is up to 47 hours so far... [Not including the music mixing or the initial research.]

Thanks for your patience

Unfortunately not much has happened since my last post.  It's that busy time of the year and I've only managed to clock in a couple of hours of work on the video since the last post.  So... thanks again for your patience.

The work continues...

I've just been slowly working away and thought it was about time for an update.

I've got a huge list of stuff in front of me and I've got to squeeze as much as possible into the video.  Right now I'm dealing with the biggest films of the year and spacing them out across the mix,  then I'll go back and add more content in the gaps.  Eventually, after many passes, when there's no gaps left it'll be done!

A huge amount of time is spent just deciding on a clip to use.  Sometimes I've already got an idea of what I want,  other times I've never even seen the movie!  Occasionally the clip I originally downloaded is no good.  Either poor quality or there's just nothing worth using in it.  When that happens I have to go and source a better clip.

Here's TrakAx in all it's glory.  Notice all the gaps in the mix that I'm slowly filling in.

I try to have transitions happen at the same time as the beats of the music.  Your brain likes it this way,  it makes everything seem right with the world!  But I'm at the mercy of the music videos a bit.  They chop and change all over the place and I have to work in with them.

The actual placement of clips is partly random and partly purposeful.  Certain song lyrics are just asking for certain film clips to play alongside them. Usually to humorous effect! [err.. well, at least humorous to me...]

I probably should mention the video editing software I'm using;  It's called 'TrakAx.'  It's nice mid range video software that might not be quite as powerful as the expensive high end editors,  but its far more advanced than other 'home user' type editors out there.  It's not without a few annoyances, but mostly it's a joy to use and very, very stable, which is kinda important when you're throwing hundreds of video clips at it!

As always,  this is a very brief explanation of whats going on.  There's much more that could be said,  but ain't nobody got time for dat!  This'll give you a little insight anyway.  See you next post.

Lip sync done

After 11 hours work, the lip syncing is done.  It's not terribly arduous or anything, it's just slow going.  Basically I have to find the part of the music video that matches the part used in the mix and line it up so that the singers lips move in sync with the words being sung.  I only want the bits of video with the band members in it, [unless there was something particularly memorable about the rest of the video].  And I don't need much for each song as there needs to be room for everything else. [movies/TV/etc]

Once again, I'll have a go at briefly explaining how it's done..

In the above shot the Blue track is the master music mix for the final video [that is - All the songs mixed together.]  The track at the bottom is the video I'm wanting to sync up.  The purple track in the middle is the original audio from that video.  All you have to do is line the blue and purple waveforms up so that they'll play at the same time.  Then delete the purple track and you're left with the video playing in sync with the music! 

Now just repeat this process for all the songs in the mix and 11 hours later you're done!

The video now has lots of blank spaces between short clips of music videos.  I now have to go back and fill them in with all the movie, TV, video games and news clips.

Music Mixing Video

So, there you go,  a vid featuring a little bit of the music mixing process.  I threw it together fairly hastily as I'd rather spend my time making the actual video instead of making "Making of" videos, but I did want to do a few of these along the way.  So,  I hope it's informative and let me know if you want to see other parts of the process done this way.  Cheers.

Music Mix Complete!

The music mix is done!  Phew.  Total time spent on the music was 28 hours!
Now on to the video.  First, I have to go through and sync up all the music videos with the audio.  More on that later.

For now, enjoy a two minute sneak preview of the audio mix!



About now it starts to feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.  Yay!

Recipe for Mixing Music

Today:  A quick lesson in music mixing.

First you'll need some kind of multi-track audio editing software.  I use an old version of Audition I've had for years and am familiar with, but something like Audacity or GarageBand will work great too.

It helps to have some basic understanding of how music structure works. 

You'll also need to know your way around an audio waveform.  Here's one I prepared earlier:

 

This is what sound looks like represented as an image.  Notice the drum beats are easily identified by sharp peaks.  [At least in this waveform]  I've also labeled the beats 1,2,3 & 4.  99% of popular music works with multiples of 4 beats per bar.  I'm not going into all that here though,  1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 will do for this.

Here's what it looks like when songs are blended together:

Notice how the first waveform's 1,2,3,4 are playing at the same time as the second's.  This is the key to the rapid fire mixes used in Remember videos.  The "1" beat of the entering song should play at the same time as the "1" beat of the exiting song.  Get that right and you've done most of the work.

You don't necessarily need to keep the 2,3,4 going as in the above example either, as long as your "1's" are firing at the same time, you're on the right track.  As seen in this mix:

Now, it helps a lot if the songs are a similar speed of course.  That's where knowing all the beats per minute's comes in handy. [Took care of that in a previous post.]  Armed with that info,  you can select songs within five or so bpm's of each other and they have a fairly good chance of blending together without too much trouble.

Much more could be said, but hopefully this has been somewhat interesting.  Hopefully the bootleggers have found this helpful too.  Looking forward to some more tight mixing from you guys!

In the mean time, I'm not quite done with the audio mix yet.  Just a couple more songs to add.  See you next post.

Mixing the Music

I was meaning to keep track of the actual hours spent on this project. So far I've forgotten about it, but from now on I'll try to keep a running tally.  So just in case you thought I hadn't been doing anything for the past few weeks,  I've clocked up 21 hours on mixing the songs so far!

This could be the most important part of the process, so its worth taking time to get the mixes tight.  When the music flows along nicely it's more pleasant to the ears and the video becomes more captivating to watch.  Plus there's something really rewarding about pulling off a great mix!

See if you can make head or tail of this screenshot while I get back to it.  More info on mixing the music in the next post.

Probably a meaningless screenshot. [unless you know anything about audio editors]