At work on the 10th album, as I slowly collect together the ideas into something coherent, I thought it would be fun (and useful) to finally work out how to post actual videos (as in, crafted videos, not live selfie phone kind of things) in Instagram.  While I still think it would be useful, it is far from fun. At least, not the uploading to Instagram part.  Making videos is always enjoyable.

 

One problem I’ve had is that Instagram seems to repeatedly crash my phone if I try to open it, so I’m already limited by what I can do on the platform because I can only do what’s possible from a desktop computer. The other problem seems to be that no matter how many knots I tie my little video into with however many helpful programs and services, it’s still never quite acceptable… you get the codex right, it’ll baulk at the file size. Re-sizing to scale down the file size makes it baulk at the picture size (and annoys me, because I think it’s a nice thing to look at in its proper size and format…. Get those things right, and then it doesn’t like the bitrate or some other damned thing…  So anyway…. since I’d wanted to try getting some actual video into Instagram (because for the past year, I’ve had a music page in there, but no videos, nothing people can click on or hear, it’s annoying and kind of dumb — don’t even get me started about non-clickable links in there…) I got the idea to make a test video, and to use the intro song (Proxima-B) to the new album I’m making as a kind of taster-teaser to give folks an idea of what this album might be about.  Well, that was the fun part.  I added in some samples from a 1980s Emergency Broadcast System test — which used to terrify me as a kid — that I’d sought out for a bit I did in one of the radio shows.  Anyway! Long story short… I'm still a little irritated as I post this.  It’s up in Facebook now, and also on Pinterest (because why not?). I'll stick it up in the Youtube channel sometime soon when I feel like it (probably tomorrow as it's late right now as I hammer this out here) … but more importantly, it’s also right here! Thank you for finding it. Please enjoy it.