Video Enhance Your CD

For those of you who are not familiar with my work or me, let me first introduce myself. My name is Bill Peck and I am a 21-year-old guitarist/producer from Orlando, Florida. My debut Video Enhanced CD "Internal Flames" was released in December of 2000 and can be purchased here at Guitar Nine. It is an all instrumental affair and includes three QuickTime movies. I currently endorse Parker Guitars, Dean Markley Strings, and Morley Pedals. I am currently doing clinics and working on my second CD. This one will be a vocal and guitar oriented project.

Making a CD is a very time consuming and costly affair. If you are someone like me, you will want every aspect of the project to be professional. This includes the recordings, graphics, packaging, and nowadays the enhancements of the CD. Including music videos on a CD was once thought impossible. With the development of our digital world it is now a reality. Many of today's most popular artists are including enhancements on their CDs. This helps increase the value of the CD and may help decrease the downloading of the complete CD. As now of now, the files are too big to just swap the enhanced portions of CDs.

You may be asking yourself, this must cost a ton of money, right? Well it certainly can, and will, if you are doing it completely professionally. The cost of the video production and conversion of the video to a digital format for my CD would have been nearly $40,000. Had I not been given a grant from Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida and Mars Music Superstore in Orlando, Florida, it would not have turned out as it did! Unless you are like me and live in a city with an opportunity like I had, I have an alternative that will be considerably less.

If you know someone with a digital video camera you are in luck. Have them record video that you would desire using for your CD. Now take the video you have and load it into a video-editing program such as Adobe's Final Cut Pro. It will take a while to render so be patient. Since programs like this separate the video and the audio, run a good CD quality recording of the song you are playing into the program replacing the existing audio. Then after you are done editing, sequence the audio and video (this means you are playing the same notes it sounds like you are playing and the drummer is hitting a high hat when it sounds like he is).

You are now ready to convert the file to another format. QuickTime Pro is a very good program to use for this. This part can take forever to render and load so be patient! The video and audio has to be compressed so make sure you use a compression level high enough to not lose the quality you desire. Once it is ready, you now have a digital file. Save the file and you are ready to begin getting ready to burn to disk. You must have an up-to-date CD burner for this as well as one that allows for burning multiple formats at once. You will create an enhanced CD instead of an audio CD. This means you will create two folders, one for the audio and the other for the other digital information you would like to include on the disk. Attach the audio and the video to their proper folders. You should also include an install of the program you will be using to view your videos with on the CD. This will go in the same folder as the video. Time to burn!

If you need more information on enhanced CD's, contact your local video professionals. Otherwise, good luck with your project! Another alternative would be to get a big record company to do it for you. Yeah right, if you are an all-instrumental artist!