Video makes a boxed set even more godlike…

Mastering the DVD

With the 22 analog cuts mastered to digital that this project required put to bed, the time came to turn attentions to the DVD that would accompany the box. The 45 cuts rendered nicely down to three CDs, leaving room in the 4xCD jewel box for a disc of videos. Back in 1985, I had bought a copy of the group’s “Showbiz Absurd” video from Japan, where one could obtain it in both the NTSC and βeta formats! After shipping and duty, I think this ¥4800 cassette ended up costing me about $60. I got my copy thanks to Ron Kane, who was then working for USSM, United States Sales & Merchandise, an importer of musical goodness.

The tape was about 28 minutes long with the following clips on it:

1. Christian
2. Working With Fire & Steel
3. Wishful Thinking
4. Hanna Hanna
5. Black Man Ray
6. King In A Catholic Style [wake up]

To this running order I added two clips that were in my analog archives of video. The earliest was a UK TV lipsync performance of the B-side [?] “Red Sails,” from an unknown program back in the day [1982]. The band looked really nervous but the director lost them in clouds of fog more appropriate for a Goth band! The other clip I had was for the song “Arizona Sky,” which MTV played once or twice in the 120 Minutes “ghetto!”

I digitized the videos from my βeta tapes using my Firewire converter box to import the clips directly into iMovie on my Mac. There I edited the clips and built the menus.  I wanted a nice animated menu, so I fired up my copy of Flash MX and animated the front end titles as detailed below. I scanned the cover of the video box, and used Photoshop to remove the cover photo and type from the front cover. This gave me a cover background element. I re-created the China Crisis logo in Adobe Illustrator, as well as all the typography on the box cover as separate elements. The animation has the box background animating into the frame in a series of arcs with the cover photo, logo, and typography animating in separately. At last, all of the elements converge to make the box cover, then the box animates away leaving the title text. This took about two to three hours but animated menus are so worth the effort. They separate the men from the boys, so to speak. I threw a loop of the “Hanna Hanna” 12″ intro under it all and rendered the Flash animation to a QuickTime file.

When I did that, I then took the iMovie files and sent them to iDVD, where I added the .MOV of the menu animation and built my interactive menus. I rendered this as a .IMG file that would be easy to generate DVDs from in Toast. By this time, I was corresponding with the creator of the Docklands website in the UK and asked him if he would like a PAL DVD of my video efforts. He was fine with that, so I rendered another DVD in PAL from iDVD. One of the things that has enhanced my life immeasurably is the ability to generate system transfers for DVD from within iDVD! I now had a NTSC and a PAL master .IMG of the China Crisis videos. With all of the music remastered and the video as well, it came time to design the whole fershlugginer thing!

Next: …Design Crisis…