December 23, 2006

Donuts (Christmas music video)

Back in the early 90s I shot this music video (also here) of Los Angeles homeless singing Jingle Bells. This was several years before Bum Fights, and was done with different intentions.

The evolution is also (to me at least) interesting. I shot it on Hi-8 and - before I learned how to do it myself (at the editing house run by the producers of this video) - had someone else edit it using analog tape and the Video Toaster. I had no place to show it except on public access cable TV. A year or three later I digitized it and put it on a CD-ROM, but there still wasn't a way to achieve mass distribution of such things. Yet another year or three later I considered offering it as a download on my website, but even by cutting it down to around 1 meg I decided against that due to bandwidth issues. (Nowadays, of course, bandwidth is fairly cheap so even at 5 megs I could have around 10,000 downloads per month for about $10 with my current host, I have spare bandwidth with another account, and Amazon has a bandwidth service I could use if I needed it).

Now, after having made and uploaded a few videos to Youtube already, I recently remembered this video and had it digitized again. After spending a lot of time finding a converter for .vob (DVD) files and then spending a lot of time converting the VOB file to a regular format, I was able to upload it to Youtube and Google Video.

Posted to Miscellania at December 23, 2006 10:58 AM

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