Bassist Rudy Sarzo (BLUE ÖYSTER CULT / DIO / ex-WHITESNAKE) has issued the following audio / video tech blog:

"In my last post I shared with you my thoughts on the importance of video content creation to promote your music. In this post I’m including a Youtube link to a promotional video clip that I created for Quiet Riot’s CD Guilty Pleasures (available below) and I’m going to share with you how I produced the clip.

In early 2001 Quiet Riot released Guilty Pleasures, the first album since 1984’s Condition Critical that featured the Metal Health line up, Kevin DuBrow, Frankie Banali, Carlos Cavazo and me. During the recording and mixing stages of the CD I brought my Canon Digital camera into the studio and quietly began to video the sessions unbeknownst to the band. My intentions were to produce a “making of” documentary. This way I was able to capture the band in a completely relaxed environment unlike what you get when a camera crew comes in and everyone is conscious of every action they make.

My ultimate goal was not only to capture the band live without interfering with the recording process but also to separately interview the members of the group and our producer and give our fans insight into the making of the record.

During the interview I asked everyone the same ten questions so I could cross fade the responses and show everyone’s viewpoint on the same subject.

Once I was satisfied with all the video content I then captured the footage into my laptop.

Now let’s take into consideration that I was using the latest technology that was available in 2001. Nowadays, most digital video cameras come with SD cards and you just drag and drop your footage into your drive or insert the SD card into the computer’s reader and bypass the video capturing stage of this process.

The editing in Sony Vegas was very straightforward. I laid all the interviews into separate tracks and set markers to separate the ten questions. I then set the in and out points of each of our responses and cross faded our remarks. Also to strengthen the replies, I then inserted B-Roll footage from our recording sessions.

I did all the editing while the producer and the rest of the band were working on the final mixes. By the time the mixes were completed, I was able to deliver the finished video and The Making of Guilty Pleasures was then included in the CD.

Looking back at the editing and rendering process, I wish I would’ve had the equipment I have available today since it took me about three hours to do the final render of this 7:49 video. Today with my NVIDIA Quadro video card I can render the same video in 10 minutes by taking advantage of NVIDIA‘s CUDA GPU driver.

In part #2 of this blog I’ll share with you how I produced Quiet Riot’s live video performance of 'Vicious Circle', a track from the Guilty Pleasures."

Thanks for reading,

Rudy