Last Sunday marked the final weekend of Nitroglobus Gallery. Dido Haas will be creating a new Hall – with the passing of Nitro Fireguard, her partner in Second Life, she had decided the old Gallery they created together should go. It could never be the same.

So in that great space that was characteristic of Nitroglobus Gallery there was a final event, with a performance by Saveme Oh and DJ Ferdy. Out of it came this video. 60GB of data collected over nearly 2 hours condensed down to 140MB in 3 minutes and 41 seconds.

Nitroglobus from Tizzy Canucci on Vimeo.

At this beginning of this year, I decided to learn Blender. It didn’t work out that way – I manoevered my way into producing my first video for work in rl in the spring. Consequently I produced my first 13 pieces of moving image work, 11 of those in Second Life. It took two days to rough out my first video, one evening the last. Every one has been different and I’ve tried to base each on different methods and means of expression. It’s been a year for video.

I use two programs. The first is ProShow Gold, an old friend, but which is really a presentation software. [Edit, 2023. Photodex, who made ProShow Gold, are no more. Their website recommends Photopia as the new alternative]. However transitions are easier and it produces better output for Vimeo/YouTube. The second is Lightworks, which is free on a weekly renewable licence. It is full NLE (non-linear editing) software, allowing many overlaying tracks, audio, visual and effects, with much more fine control over the effects than low cost video editing software. Unfortunately the output on a free licence is limited to one setting – 720p – but that’s hardly a fair complaint about a spectacularly good offer. Combined with Fraps for video recording, Audacity for audio editing, VLC for viewing and extracting snapshots (I always thought it was just a viewer) and Photoshop, that’s got it covered.

Everything I’ve produced is Creative Commons, respecting the licences on the music I’ve used. Free Music Archive is a tremendous resource. Needless to say, content is variable and it’s trial and error to find the right track, but it’s available for use provided you respect the licences.

I’m still having problems with YouTube and copyright trolls who seem to look for anything without a commercial licence and stick their flag in it. The present claim they have against a video of mine is for music that is also on the band’s website, and I’ve been in correspondence with the named contact in the band over it too. This position benefits both YouTube and the trolls financially, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it seems heavily weighted in favour of the trolls. YouTube’s dismissiveness of Creative Commons is also shown in that there are only two settings – copyright or CC – when CC has several options giving different levels of permissions of (re)use.

I’m very close to pulling everything off YouTube for this reason, though in any case it streams so badly on my system that I often give up, and uploading is a pain. When the world is moving to WeTransfer, Dropbox (which Vimeo supports), Google Drive etc, why do YouTube still require an on-the-fly hour-long upload to a webpage that can’t be closed?

Anyway… the video’s above. Hope you enjoy it.

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Video music credits:

Tango Mécanique (Instrumental, from ‘A Man Disappeared Once’) (Kirk Pearson and BIT) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Interlude 3 (Quiet Music for Tiny Robots) / CC BY 4.0