Halloween 2009

Well we survived another crazy Halloween season. This year in haunt news:

1. Bought a brand new projector with money from our DVD and music sales. A Panasonic PT-AE3000U which is the one I have been planning to purchase for a few years (at least the older model). It is a very nice full HD projector, and looked great on my house. We watched Johnny Depp in "Secret Window" last night, and it looked great. OK movie by the way. Johnny Depp can make anything fresh.
2. Remixed the whole haunt to 1080p HD. That took most of my time for haunt enhancement this year, but it was worth it. When watching the haunt everyone kept saying "____ is new this year right?" I just kept saying, "no, it was there before, you just couldn't see it ;-)". Hooray for HD! Only problem is that with the 16x9 aspect I had to put the projector further away from my house. I also had to lower it to let me get the sidewalk and the top of the house. This is very unfortunate because people's shadows were much more obvious. Don't know the solution to that one though because any farther back and I will have to cut down my neighbors trees just like I did mine ;-).
3. Built a huge 16 foot projection tower to put my new projector in. I opted to make it out of 3" ABS so the projection box can go up and down like on a flag pole. It worked all right after some battling. Of course it is also nice that ABS is black. Because of the new tower I was able to put the projector whatever height I wanted in the middle of my neighbors yard without having to use the fence for support. Very cool... Very large galvanized pipe stakes holding that baby there... Hope I can get them out.
4. Worked on some new segments for the haunt, but didn't finish in time. Tried them out at the end of the night on family and friends and they were a hit.... Next year!!
5. Got a nice write up in the Taylorsville/Kearns newspaper that got a lot of nice comments. You can read it here: Bates Haunt in Local Newspaper

The video is still in progress. I taped it with my kind brother in law's professional HD camera, so it should look good... Unfortunately I used the P2 compression so he has to convert it to something useable for me.

I thought you might be interested in some stats on my Adobe Premiere project. It may be the most complex Premiere project ever (probably cause no one else is stupid enough to do a show this complex in Premiere ;-) ). I really need to port it to After Effects.

• 43 Video Sequences
• 287 Video Tracks
• 2422 Layered Video Filters
• 4729 Positioning Keyframes

Not sure how long it takes to render because it crashes Premiere unless prerender most of the sequences. If I start from scratch and combine the time for all the individual builds it adds up to 6+6+4+2+5+3+5 = 31 hours. Fortunately the final mix is only 5 hours, so if I am making only minor tweaks at the top level, I can render it overnight.

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween!!!