DVD Creation: Behind the Scenes

Hi everyone,

Well, this isn't a touring post, but something I thought I'd share in the eve of our forthcoming new DVD, our third one, in fact, and I believe our best DVD yet. Anyways, TP is a very DIY (do-it-yourself) kind of group, and thusly, for all our DVDs, we have done everything ourselves (except shoot the footage). I thought it would be fun to show how it all gets done, since it's a creative endeavor just as playing taiko is, but as far as I know, we're one of only a handful of taiko groups who actually produce their own DVDs. Anyways, a little tour of the programs we use to get it done....

Usually the first thing we do is get the video footage from whatever videographers shot our shows--in the case of our current DVD, that would be Akira Boch (a great local videographer and filmmaker who also works for JANM, and incidentally is married to one of our Bombu Taiko members!), as well as the staff at LA36 (a local tv channel that records shows at the Ford Amphitheatre, where we have produced shows in 2006 and 2008). After getting the tapes digitized and onto hard drives, we begin the editing process...



As a lot of taiko players will tell you, videos of taiko groups edited by non-taiko players are okay, but a lot of times, it'll focus on someone playing the basebeat in the back while a fabulous solo is being played in front. Editing is hard to do, because unless you know each song from front to back, you don't know how to edit it to show the song and the group in its best light. It's with this idea that I first told myself, "Well, I'll just learn to edit video myself." I am by no means a pro editor, but I can at least edit our footage so that it shows the best parts as much as possible, and I think for the most part it's pretty good. Anyways, above is a screenshot of the Final Cut Pro interface--the top two windows with video are your viewers where the video plays back, to the left of that is your list of "assets" or video files for the most part, and then the strip along the bottom is your timeline, where you can edit video and audio files to your heart's enjoyment. It's good fun.

Next, we add in title text files, basically text that identifies songs in the show, or in various sections, tells you what's going on, or who is being interviewed, etc, etc.



This is the interface from Motion. This program I know even less than Final Cut, but I know just enough to do a decent subtitle. The titles for the first two TP DVDs were done in LiveType, but I think that's becoming defunct, so I started using Motion. Nothing too exciting about this part of the process, you just have to choose font size, type, and then align it where you want, and then determine timing and how it will appear and then disappear. There's a million and one cheesy ways to have text come in and out--we usually keep it pretty simple and clean.

Next up, also pretty boring, but we process the audio files with A.Pack:



Basically, what this program does is to compress audio files into a smaller file so that it will fit on your DVD and you can put more video footage on your DVD. You just click and drag your audio file into the boxes on the left, hit 'encode' and a few minutes later, you have an .ac3 file. Voila.

The last part of the process (almost) is to author the DVD. For this, we use DVD Studio Pro 3...



In this program, you can author your DVD however you like--design DVD menus, determine how people will navigate through the menus, how things transition once you click a button, what colors for buttons are before being selected, when they are selected, and then when they are clicked. All this stuff is done in DVD SP. And of course, my personal favorite...you can add easter eggs into your DVD here. More on that later, for now I'll explain the interface....

In the upper left box, you see a list of your content--First there are menus (in the RR08 DVD, there are three, a main menu, a song selection menu, and a bonus videos menu. Under that you have your tracks--videos, and then scripts (I don't use it...uh...dunno really what it means), Slideshows (for prior DVDs we've had slideshows, for this one, we filled it up all with video footage), and Languages (but for our DVDs we pretty much just do it in one language).

In the middle top box, that's your viewer, where you can see what your menus or videos will look iike when people pop your DVD into their DVD player. It's like your canvas in which to create. The blue lines outlining it show you your "safe area"...as in, don't put anything outside of this area or it won't show up on some tvs. Good to know. On the right top are your template, which I usually don't use too much, and bottom right is a detailed menu where you can adjust details for various assets in your DVD--it changes whenever you click on something else. And on bottom is your timeline, where you can adjust videos and slideshows, and add stuff like "chapter markers," basically where you would advance to in a video when you click to the next track.

If you can see the colored meter at the top, you might see that it says 4.6 GB--a normal DVD holds 4.7 GB worth of information, so we filled this one as we did the last two, to the brim with content! Also, a note on easter eggs--these are hidden features that you may find on DVDs--showing hidden videos or features that aren't listed on the menu. We have included four easter eggs on the new DVD, so look for them, because....well, why not? They're fun to watch! Another thing...there are easter eggs on ALL the TP DVDs...have you seen them? Or have they been hidden away on your DVD...still waiting to be watched...? Search and you shall find...

The very last step in the whole process is to design the packaging, which was done for this DVD by the fantastic Deborah Laux of RosesRoad.com (also known as Claire's mom--Claire is one of our Kitsune Taiko kids). I'm out of time for this posting, but I'll do another one soon to show you how it's turning out--in the meantime, the DVD is at the production house, so in a couple of weeks, it'll be back on its way and ready to sell! We are taking pre-orders right now, so check out www.TAIKOPROJECT.com for more info!

-Bryan