Archie is a good-lookin' fella.

Making videos for YouTube

Well, it's harder than I thought it would be to make a satisfactory video to upload to YouTube. Their system will not allow just any old avi so I had to do some re-encoding. Since YouTube re-encodes when you upload, any re-encoding is highly undesirable as it will drastically reduce the quality of your clip. I was forced to re-encode one of my videos, as everytime I tried to cut the video from the front, this particular video kept turning out with no picture - arghh!! Must have been some necessary info missing everytime I did it - I tried many free tools to repair and rebuild keyframes and indices, etc., etc., but was finally forced to simply cut and re-encode which rewrites the information and generally solves such problems. I was, however, able to keep the original audio stream, which is most important in an opera video, so I was pleased with that. Still, upon uploading to YouTube, the video at first turned out with a nasty black pixelated look for the first few seconds. I tried many things to get rid of this and finally succeeded by using the x264 video codec rather than xVid. The main free tool I used to do this work is one I have had sitting on my pc desktop for ages and had no idea of all the useful things it could do. It is called avidemux. It can do way more than de-mux. It can mux, encode, cut, join, AND it supports quite a few different file formats. It can also do many of these actions to the original information without re-encoding so you may keep your original quality of video and audio if necessary.

Turns out getting your container right is also pretty important; ('container' meaning avi, mp4, mov, etc.) I always used to make all my videos .avi since the free player I use on my Dell Axim doesn't seem to care what the container is as long as it can process the codecs. However, when uploading to YouTube, an accurate container and file name extension seem to make a big difference in success of the upload, playability, and quality. I decided to simply go for no re-encoding of my second video which was h264 avc and aac audio, since it was possible to cut the video successfully without any re-encoding. This was my original video and I did not want to go back an recapture the video digitally again, however, cutting and getting a video perfectly synced from the avc variable rate video proved a challenge. I finally figured out it is pretty much a snap using the free tool, AVI-Mux GUI. I have used this tool many times for simple muxing, but had never noticed if you click on the audio track, a little box shows where you can set an audio delay - (duh, how great is that?)

I rather prefer hard-coded subtitles on this type of opera clip, but since that would cause a need for re-encoding, I used YouTube's closed-captioning option for the subtitles. I did that on my previous video also as it is very convenient. I also force the option in my embedded videos here, but I don't think you can force the option at YouTube. I am a huge fan of English subtitles for opera - makes the piece come alive to me to fully understand everything being said.

Anyway, there are many great, ad-free, safe, and powerful free tools for video editing out there for Windows users that often can do more operations that spendy software. Many of these tools don't even have to be 'installed' on your pc, but are rather, stand-alone executables.

"Cortigiani, vil razza, dannata!..."

This is one of my favorite baritones singing the big bit from Verdi's Rigoletto, "Cortigiani, vil razza, dannata!..." (Courtiers, you vile, damned race!...") In this solo, Rigoletto, the court jester, whose daughter has just been kidnapped by the duke's courtiers for his immoral pleasure, hurls abuses at the kidnappers. When he realizes he is powerless before them, he then begs them for pity. He pleads with them to return his daughter to him, as, he says, his daughter is his whole world.

Louis Quilico was a famous Verdi baritone who also sang much French opera as he was Canadian-born of an Italian father and a French-Canadian mother. He died in 2000. He has a son, Gino Quilico, who is also today quite successful as an operatic baritone, but his son has a lighter voice and does not have the fatness of sound, and general largeness of voice like his father had, which makes for a more successful Verdi baritone. Rigoletto was probably Louis Quilico's most famous role. This clip is from a Metropolitan Opera broadcast from 1981 with Luciano Pavarotti singing the role of the Duke. The entire opera is currently available for streaming rental at the Met Opera website.