Roll To The Rescue Bots – Episode 02 – “Under Pressure”

Welcome to our ongoing experiment known as “Roll To The Rescue Bots”.  This second show has been hard to complete.  It had a couple of problems.  The first issue that we had was that we recorded the show in the basement.  The playroom down there has toys and a comfy couch, but it doesn’t have a lot of natural light.  Our first episode was filmed on a bright, sunny morning with plenty of light coming in the windows.  Episode 2 was done closer to dusk, so I had to use a spotlight that put the whole scene in this sickly yellow color.  This looks fantastic in high res.

Which brings me to the second problem: we filmed this one in HD.  I used our older camera to record the show last time, so our maximum resolution was 640×480.  I rendered to video at 720×480, so we ended up with black bars on either side.  I decided to film the next episode at 1280×720 (720P) with our newer camera, but the weak lighting made the whole thing grainy.  On top of that, the camera constantly shifts focus between the toys (in the foreground) to us.  It just came across as ugly, so I had absolutely no motivation to edit and complete it.  I procrastinated.

So a month later, I still hadn’t finished the video.  It occurred to me that I had no clips of “Under Pressure” to work with.  My usual method was not working and I couldn’t find a clean copy online anywhere.  Seriously, no one likes this show enough to post it online?  Not even the Hub?  So, I had to resort to drastic measures: the AIDEN-CAM.  God help me, I strapped a camera to my kid’s head.  Mission accomplished, worst parent ever.  But I got the shots and cobbled together a show with horrible production values.  I promise, the next episode will be AWESOME, to make up for this.

On the bright side, a lot of learning experiences came from this episode.  I learned to allow at least six hours to upload a thirty minute HD video to YouTube.  Maybe I need a better upload speed?  Also, Aiden and I might film the next review on a couch near bigger windows.  Or out on the deck.  We’ll see.  And I’ve already found recordings of the next few Rescue Bots episodes, so no more camera helmets for Aiden.  Let us know how you liked this problem-ridden episode, and please give us feedback on what you liked or didn’t like, since as you can see, this is an evolving process.

The preceding post was reprinted here with permission of MichaelAndChrissy.com Check out the original post by Michael Wilson here