look ma, no film

From Saturday’s videotaping extravaganza (oh, how much I have to learn about videography) to this afternoon, I have been able to create a CD with a video on it, suitable for sharing.

I did end up with a couple of coasters as I experimented with mkisofs(8) and it’s options. It was easy to create a disk image that could be loaded on a Mac as a disk, but counter-intuitively, that’s not what you want to burn to a CD.

I took what I learned and put it in a shell script for safekeeping. Variable $1 is the image file to be created and $2 is the directory tree that will be on the CD.
mkhybrid -R -J -hfs -l -o $1 $2

If I was to do one of these again, I’d do a few things differently:


  • go to the dress rehearsal and tape it, end to end, to see how long everything will be and get some cues
  • set up so you can see everything without being a distraction. I used a tripod but because I didn’t keep my face in the eyepiece, folks assumed I wasn’t shooting and walked across the frame. A step ladder (how geeky is that?) would have been a good idea, with a good clamp. The camera had a rotating LCD panel and a remote: I could have shot from across the room.
  • the camera has a still frame function: that would have been useful for head shots

If you believe that no experience is valuable unless you learn from it, I had a fine weekend.

I can certainly see the appeal for this kind of work.