Seeking a Little Help

[Spun Lepton]

Hey all. So, a friend of mine and I are following through on an idea I've been wanting to try for a while.

We're going to ape Mystery Science Theater, (and RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic), but we want to do it for Netflix films. We're calling it DIY Commentary or DIYC.

We're recording it as an audio track that you manually sync to the Netflix film on your computer. Unfortunately, I know of no way to have the audio automatically sync with the film. So, I wanted to see if anybody had any suggestions for doing something like that. Currently, the plan is to walk the listener through syncing it up. "Cue your movie to 1:36:04 and pause it. Click play when we say go. 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Go." Something like that.

When it's done, I'm naturally going to run it by Match Cut. Any guinea pigs willing to subject themselves to our first track and then give us some feedback on how easy or hard it was to sync would be appreciated.

And you won't need to tell us how unfunny we are, we already know that all too well.

[Skitch]

I'm in. :)

[Irish]

Is this going to be like your review thread? If so I definitely want in to the beta.

I don't think the original sync is the challenge (sounds like you've got a handle on that already). I think the challenge is going to be buffering.

A viewer having to re-sync your audio multiple times will become tedious and this might out-weigh the entertainment value, no matter how good your content. Now, I don't have a problem with Netflix but them I'm in a major city with a fast connection (at least, fast by US standards) but not everybody does.

At the very least I'd keep that issue in mind and try and design content around it. You might not need perfect 1:1 syncing if you allow a kind of audio "white space" around your commentary, and shy away from jokes that require exact timing.

The other thing I'd do is repurpose the content. I'd take your "Mystery Science Theater" track and reshape it into an alternate download that people could play during the end credits or just after they finished watching the movie. Think of it as a version of "Jeff Craig's 60 Second Preview" .. but from hell. Even if this is just you reading your print reviews in a fast, angry, rant it could have value.

If you wanted to go way overboard with this idea, consider doing snarky subtitles for the hearing impaired, or at least providing a time coded transcript of the material people could follow along with.

So: Similar content, multiple ways for the viewer to enjoy it.

[D_Davis]

Without being able to dl an audio stream of the film, and mixing it with commentary as a single track, getting it to sync up exactly will be nearly impossible.

What you might want to do is include chapter stops in the audio track to coincide with hour:minute marks in the film. This way, if things start to get off the user can sync to time/chapter at any point they want.

Also, with Netflix you'll run into buffering problems that could throw the whole thing off, but the above-suggestion is a way to work around that.

[Spun Lepton]

The thought of actually getting a hold of the movie itself and putting the commentary track into it was a thought, but there would be all kinds of copyright problems doing that.

[Irish]

The thought of actually getting a hold of the movie itself and putting the commentary track into it was a thought, but there would be all kinds of copyright problems doing that.

Yeah, those would get pulled by YouTube.

If you were leaning in that direction, the I'd imitate something like Red Letter Media's format. Take excepts from the film and use other visuals to enhance the material. That way, at least you can claim fair use. But this is also a different beast than doing straight up DVD commentaries.

Any way you go, I'm looking forward to the outcome, Spun.

[Spun Lepton]

After giving RiffTrax.com a better look, I'm now beginning to think I may just submit iRiffs to them. They will actually host the files and I might be able to make a tiny bit of change doing them. I was hoping for a Netflix option, but that doesn't appear possible. According to some resources I've been reading, however, it might be in a future release of their "RiffPlayer" software.

[D_Davis]

I'm totally down with listening to one to test out.

Piece of advice - get descent mics, and make the voices sound good. I don't care how good the content is, if the quality is off - such as uneven levels, poor EQ, too much reverb/echo - I probably won't listen.

If you need some advice on audio recording, hit me up.

[Irish]

I vote (do I have a vote? :P) for whatever gets this up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. That is, doing the simplest thing that works. (You can always change it up later).

I heard a rumor recently that Netflix is considering moving away from Silverlight to HTML5. If that happens, you might have a lot more options.

[Spun Lepton]

Thanks, D. I'll probably be in touch.

I have a really nice pair of $80 headphones that I use for my PS3. The mic is surprisingly good. My buddy is going to be picking up a pair just before we begin recording. We were actually going to leave the movie playing in the background, thinking that could help people keep their audio tracks synced.

It appears the RiffTrax community has a bunch of people who will just sync the tracks to Netflix Instant. So, that's encouraging.

[Skitch]

Hmm, I might avoid having movie audio. If its synced even a hair off, could be really annoying hearing it in echo, unless the viewer muted their movie.

[D_Davis]

Hmm, I might avoid having movie audio. If its synced even a hair off, could be really annoying hearing it in echo, unless the viewer muted their movie.

This.

Do not have the movie audio on your track. If it's just a tiny little bit out of sync, it will cause phasing/flanging and maybe some phase canceling, and if it's more out of sync it'll just be annoying.

[Dukefrukem]

I'm in too!

[Spun Lepton]

All right, just an update. We're going ahead with this, and we're planning to host the commentary track on RiffTrax, but it's slow-moving because we've basically started over to follow the advice found on that site.

We're going with the same movie we found on Netflix. It's a real stinker of a horror movie.

D, do you have any experience with Audacity? That's the program I'm using. I'm planning to get two headsets and plug them into a splitter, which in turn plugs into the mic and speaker jacks on my laptop. That way we can hear the movie and our commentary through the headphones without the audio from the movie getting on to the commentary track.

[D_Davis]

Audacity should be fine for that.

You might want to look into picking up a cheap Behringer audio interface, so that you can run both of the headsets simultaneously onto their own channel.

I use this on my iPad, and it works great for the price.

http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCA202-Audio-Interface/dp/B000KW2YEI

With this, you can select the record one mic on the left channel, and one mic on the right channel (both in mono, which is fine). This will give you a little more flexibility when it comes time to mix/master the audio. This will also give you slightly better audio. All for $30.

[D_Davis]

Laptops typically have poor audio performance - bad ins and outs, and cheap DACs (digital audio converters for recording). Running straight into your laptop's audio input will probably be noisy. With that little Behringer, things should be much better. It's not a top of the line device, but to get started it's great.

[Spun Lepton]

So, will this device work with two sets of headphones w/ built-in mics? We need both headsets to have audio in and out.

[D_Davis]

It should with the right connections.

It has audio in and out.

Do your headsets have TRS connections? (Tip, Ring, Sleave).

I'd probably just have the movie audio coming off of a more distant source, with the mics being close and the gain low so it wouldn't pick up the movie audio, rather than the movie audio being piped back into your headsets.

Just experiment with a couple different set ups to see what you like and what works.

[Spun Lepton]

We haven't picked up any headsets, yet. We're still writing the jokes. We don't have a ton of money to spend on headsets, but I would love to hear your suggestions.

[bac0n]

I'm totally down with listening to one to test out.

Piece of advice - get descent mics, and make the voices sound good. I don't care how good the content is, if the quality is off - such as uneven levels, poor EQ, too much reverb/echo - I probably won't listen.

If you need some advice on audio recording, hit me up.

Good advice, D - and spun I got a mic and a pop filter you can borrow if you want.

[Spun Lepton]

This is still happening, by the way. We're working about 4 hours a week on it. There was also a bit of a hiatus when we found we were getting burned out. I had NO IDEA how time-consuming writing jokes would be. It takes about an hour to write jokes for 5 minutes of film-time. By the time we finish, I fear the movie will be removed from Netflix. We still have a half-hour of the film to go, too.

[Spun Lepton]

After a daunting 4.5-hour session last night, we finished writing all the jokes. 55 pages written in my screenwriting software. We seriously underestimated the effort that would need to go into this and we've gained a newfound respect for the MST3K crew.

After we've recorded, if we never see this movie again it'll be too soon. It's just a terrible movie.

[Spun Lepton]

Oh, crud. I just stumbled across this thread. Forgot all about this. Well, this stalled, probably permanently. The friend I was working with had his GF move in with him and he disappeared off the face of the planet. I see him a fraction of the time I used to.

[Thirdmango]

I asked a couple of questions to Kevin Murphy when he was here for SL Comic Con and I got that same sort of reaction as your second to last post where it really does take a long time. If you ever do it again the format they do now is they see how many writers they have per movie, they'll each watch the movie through once but then they'll split the movie up into how many people they have. So they had 6 people for Deathly Hollows Part 1, split the movie into 6 parts and had each person write for their section. Then they come back together read the scripts each person has written and then meld the breaks in between a little more.

Good luck if it ever ends up working out again.

[Spun Lepton]

The movie we were going to Riff was Midnight Mass, a spectacularly awful vampire movie shot in New Jersey. There were so many sitty-standy-talky-talky scenes that went on FOREVER that it started to get a little ridiculous. Like, literally five minutes of people sitting around talking about shit that was happening off-screen. The lead antagonist was a terrible actor with a hilarious NJ accent.