As webmaster for the Basingstoke Tappers I get an excuse to play with the web in a more serious manner.  Recently I was asked to create a promotional video for them.  Fortunately the last couple of years the summer shows have been recorded professionally and made available on DVD – which meant with the use of Video ReDo I could easily extract clips and audio that I could use. Although deciding what would make a good clip was a lot harder.

Having gathered the images and clips I wanted to use I pieced it together with MPEG Wizard (from Womble.com), which once you’ve got a feel for the application is brilliant – sequencing and setting up some very smooth transitions, overlayed audio etc etc.  for a $100 application it is very impressive. My only critism of MPEG wizard was that the codecs I tried to use didn’t seem to encode in a way that I expected(one of a fair range of output codecs)  – I certainly had playback problems when I put the produced AVI on another machine.  So I simply used Auto Gordian Knot to transcode to a format that I knew to be playable on anything (and tweak the compression ratio etc) .

The final step – zap it up to Google Video to host and add a link into the CMS that we use to run the site.  The facility to configure the video settings for Google meant the video looks like it is actually embedded straight into the site (the only give away is the little Google logo). You can see the result at www.BasingstokeTappers.co.uk/video.