I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project! When Prof Karendra Devroop from Unisa Music Foundation phoned me earlier this year to hear if I'd be interested in editing and mastering this project to DVD for him, it took me about half a second to say yes! I had worked with Karendra before and I was thrilled to have another opportunity to do so again.

Honestly working on this was a breeze. Kudos to Unisa for giving me full access to the raw footage, all the branding artwork I could ask for and just being super helpful in general. It is rare these days to have university projects run this smoothly and to get this level of cooperation from internal departments when you're a freelancer.


Above: this, folks, is what your footage backups should look like. I've been advocating this approach myself for a long time - keep every project on its own drive. So all those little files you have scattered all over your computer and the bloody "cloud"? Yeah that's just going to get you into trouble sooner or later... 

Unisa's Sound and Video department supplied HD footage from five camera sources on harddrive. I also received a set of mixed soundtracks, recorded and mastered to perfection by sound engineer Evert de Munnik. Setting up the editing project required me to pull everything into Avid Media Composer and perform a five source multicam edit. Syncing the footage up with the mixed soundtracks was easy thanks to Media Composer's waveform analysis function, and of course the good ol' Mk I eyeball - if you look for the right visual cues in multiple angles it is possible to sync picture and audio up with a large amount of accuracy.



The project, supported by the US Embassy in South Africa, features a number of jazz tracks from South African composers and is performed by local and US musicians. This really is top class stuff and good news is that it will be on YouTube after the CD is launched in a few days. So stay tuned!