Back in December, BCS gave a virtual holiday card to the Bloomington community: in collaboration with eleven other local-area choirs and musicians, BCS presented a 21-video playlist of small groups singing (and playing) called "Songs of Comfort and Joy" (click or tap on the title to listen).
Unlike our November virtual choir video, O Love, the BCS videos were edited by member volunteers. The biggest volunteer effort came from David Rohlfing, BCS bass and board treasurer, who edited seven videos in two weeks—or more accurately, one video the first week and SIX videos the second week! Let’s learn more about this amazing accomplishment …
Video editor David Rohlfing: A Race Against Time
Q: You learned to use two new software programs in ten days. You edited six videos in a week. How did your background prepare you for such a venture?
D: I am a retired physicist and have spent much of my life learning to do things by reading and experimenting. I taught physics at a small liberal arts college for five years and then moved to an industrial research lab for the next 30 years, where I worked with computer data. I have programmed in BASIC, FORTRAN and object-oriented Pascal. All the Pascal programming from about 1986 to the present was self-taught, especially the transition from DOS-based to Windows-based programming. I created a Windows lab data analysis program that is still being used 10 years after I left the company! In other words, I am well practiced at problem solving and utilizing the capabilities of a computer.
Q: When did you first teach yourself video editing?
D: In 2001, we took a trip to England to visit Cambridge, Oxford, Winchester, Salisbury, Stonehenge and, of course, London. We took a rather large Sony video camera using Super 8 tapes (remember those?). Upon returning, I edited it into a DVD with appropriate English and Renaissance music. No zooming or panning in those days!
Audio-wise, I have been recording our church services for over 30 years. I have a lot of experience equalizing various audio levels and putting the pieces together to make CDs for shut-ins and the archives. I also record six performances per year of the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project at St. Thomas Lutheran Church. For these, I simply cut out the noise between movements and even out sound levels; then I burn a CD with tracks for the different movements.
Q: Tell us about the BCS Holiday Video project. How did that come about?
D: Just for fun last spring, I taught myself how to make virtual choir videos using a free program called OpenShot. Since there are no manuals any longer, I went to YouTube for videos on how to use it. Following the videos and examples, I figured out how to make the picture-in-picture boxes for individual singers. I then recorded myself singing all four SATB parts and made a video of myself singing the hymn Beautiful Savior. I knew now that I could do simple videos with a small number of singers. I should have stopped there, but I shared the result with Gerry Sousa. My secret was out!
In this video, See Amid the Winter's Snow, David arranged 9 individual singers in boxes; he is in the middle row (in front of a window) You may click or tap photo to watch video.
Q: What software programs did you learn?
D: BCS purchased the Adobe Creative Cloud software just before Thanksgiving. I had about 10 days to learn to use Premier Pro (video and audio) and Audition (audio) before the job of making the virtual choir videos began. Fortunately, there are YouTube videos on how to do every little thing. I spent a lot of time watching videos, doing Adobe tutorials and practice examples.
Q: Did you have any help?
D: I was grateful to choir member Abby Henkel, who did all the editing for Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Ian Pottmeyer, who mixed the audio for I Saw Three Ships.
Claire Tafoya and I worked together on the rest. She made the opening and closing credits, and had the concept of making slide shows with the singers around the middle image, which split up the work and made it possible. We began by working on Dona Nobis Pacem because they were the first to submit all their individual recordings.
Q: And then came crunch time. Tell us how that unfolded.
D: I spent about a week on Dona, learning how to put sound and video together and collaborating with Claire, while waiting for individual videos to finish being submitted for the rest of the songs; this happened by around December 7–8. Then things got tight, with six other videos to do by the deadline of December 15.
The first job was to mix and balance the audio. Then, synchronize the videos using the “clap” or other marker at the beginning of the recordings (in an individual video, all singers might clap one measure before starting to sing, to help line up the videos precisely). Next, I get them positioned on the screen around the slideshow. I would have enjoyed moving the boxes around throughout the song, but there wasn’t time for that. Fortunately, the slideshows provided movement and interest.
There were problems and frustrations on my end: not all the videos were submitted in the same resolution, which meant the math for the scaling and positioning of the boxes was different for the two primary resolutions of 720p and 1080p. There were a couple of other resolutions as well. I did a lot of calculating and made a spreadsheet of scales and positions for 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, and 7x7 grids at two resolutions. Additionally, not everyone managed to clap at the proper place at the beginning of the videos or even clap at all. There are few cases where lips don’t quite match the music as well as I would like.
It did become a race against time. I needed help with the audio on the more involved songs. Fortunately, soprano Jan Allen happened to know and recommend an audio engineer, Dasha Gilmore, who stepped in on short notice and mixed the audio for See Amid the Winter Snow, Silent Night, and Hallelujah Chorus, and then went back and balanced the audio mix for Dona Nobis Pacem. We did get them done. I’m not sure how!
Q: In retirement, many people engage in leisure activities instead of tackling projects like this. What made it worthwhile?
A: I'm really not good with what most people consider leisurely activities. I'm the kind of person who likes a project where I can work alone and learn something new. This fit the bill nicely.
Many thanks to our sponsors and grantors, who made this project possible.
