RUDY SARZO's Audio Video Tech Blog: The Making Of 'Vicious Circle' Clip

Legendary hard rock bassist Rudy Sarzo (BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, DIO, OZZY OSBOURNE, QUIET RIOT) has posted the latest installment of his "Audio Video Tech Blog". It follows in its entirety below.

"In my last post I shared with you how I created 'The Making of Guilty Pleasure', a clip that was included on QUIET RIOT's 2001 CD release of 'Guilty Pleasure'. In this post I'm going to show you how I produced a promotional clip for 'Vicious Circle' from JumboTron footage of one of our live shows. You can view the clip [below].

"QUIET RIOT went on a promotional tour shortly after the release of 'Guilty Pleasure' and we soon began looking for ways to promote the album.

"After years of making MTV videos, we knew that having a professional-quality promotional video of one of the best received songs from the CD to post on the Internet was our best option. Unfortunately we had 'zero' budget for such a video.

"After one of our festival performances, the camera crew that was shooting the JumboTron footage handed us an edited VHS copy of our entire performance as it was projected on the screens. Eureka!!! Now we have the professionally shot footage we needed. So I immediately began digitizing the footage into my laptop to edit in Sony Vegas.

"Since necessity is the mother of invention, I had to get creative in capturing the footage from VHS to digital format. My only option at that moment in 2001 was to transfer the VHS footage into my Canon digital camera and then use FireWire to get it on my laptop. Today there are plenty of analog-to-digital conversion options in the market. Though I lost one generation in the transfer process, the footage didn't suffer too much degradation and it was going to be compressed for web viewing anyways.

"The song 'Vicious Circle' from our new CD was the obvious choice since it was one of the highlights of our live show. My editing process was actually simpler than my previous video, 'The Making of Guilty Pleasures', since the song was already edited on the fly by the director from all the multi cameras as they were projected on the screen. But since the director was not familiar with our show, some of his edits missed some of the magic moments as they happened on stage. So I got creative.

"I assembled one track in Sony Vegas with the complete songs as it was captured by the video crew.

"One thing that I must mention is that the VHS copy we were handed had no audio. Since we were planning on using the audio track from the CD and matching it to the performance on the video, it wasn't much of an issue. Though it would've been nice to have the live audio track on the video to at least do some rough matching to the CD track. Frankie Banali has excellent meter, so matching the live video performance to the CD was a cinch even though Frankie didn't play to a click track.

"My next step was to find performance highlights from each of our individual performances throughout the remainder of the show to use as B-Roll inserts and create MTV-style jump cuts and some cross fades. After assembling the individual B-Roll footage, I began inserting them in the desired spots of the song adding a bit more excitement to the video.

"The whole creative process of editing and choosing the preferred B-Roll footage took me about four hours but in contrast the rendering process to a 720x480 AVI took me over two hours. Just to show how far technology has advanced over the years, I can now render that same video with my NVIDIA Quadro video card in 6 minutes or less by taking advantage of NVIDIA's CUDA GPU driver.

"On my next blog, I'm going to share with you some of the incredible GPU-based 3D video and audio technology that I witnessed at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in early October."