The Good Neighbors Video Project

For 3 days last week I worked on a very interesting project...

Not long ago, a very dear brother in the Lord, Jim Lanning, contacted me and asked if I could produce a video to put on DVD to help him and his church to promote a ministry known as The Good Neighbors Ministry. The focus of the ministry is to provide a free lunch to children in an economically disadvantaged, unincorporated town in Central Texas known as Redwood, during the summer months when schools in the San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District are not in session. 

Redwood, Texas

Redwood, Texas is about 7 or so miles east of San Marcos, Texas. The neighborhood there is comprised mostly of Hispanic families and as you drive through the little town you can tell there is little there in terms of economic prosperity. Most of the inhabitants there live in single-wide or double-wide mobile homes or manufactured housing. Many of the properties are run down or in disrepair. From all outward appearances, it just doesn't appear to be a place where there is much happiness. However, there is one bright spot in town at the corner of County Road 245 and Poplar St., Redwood Baptist Church.

Redwood Baptist Church isn't unlike many other small community churches in Central Texas. The church building is comprised of a main structure that apparently had it's beginnings as a manufactured building. There is an outdoor pavilion where people congregate after the Sunday morning services and enjoy a church luncheon. 

There is also a new building that has recently been erected in order to serve as a small community health center office to allow people to come and get their blood pressure checked and see a community nurse periodically. The community health center building is owned by the Redwood Community Center, Inc. and Redwood Baptist Church hosts the building on their property as the church location is well known and convenient to the area.  

The leaders of the church noticed a few years ago that during the summer months, when school is not in session, the children of the neighborhood were languishing spiritually and physically so they decided to embark on a neighborhood ministry to try to help the neighborhood. In all too many cases, the children of the neighborhood do not get the proper nutrition they need and for a disproportionate number of them, a school lunch may be the only meal they get to eat every day. The church decided to start what they call The Good Neighbors ministry, in partnership with the San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District. 

Every weekday during the summer from early June, after the school year has been completed, until the middle of August when the school year begins again, the church provides a venue for children of the community to come and eat a free, nutritious lunch prepared by San Marcos CISD employees. 

At 11:00 AM a small nondescript white van pulls up to the church pavilion and distributes lunches to any child aged 18 and under for free. This meal is available until 2:00 PM. If there are any adults in the community that wish to eat with their children, they can do so for a cost of $2.75. Unfortunately, in today's economic times there are many adults who are unemployed and cannot even afford to pay the small nominal fee, but they are not turned away hungry. The church also has a van that will go to various areas in the community, too far away from the church for small children to walk, and pick up kids and bring them to the church so they can eat their lunch. The drivers for these rides are all volunteers.

During this period of time for 3 hours, the church also provides space for a reading program to take place where adults from Redwood Baptist Church and other local San Marcos area churches oversee and assist children who might have trouble reading and, using a curriculum developed by the American Bible Society, gives the children the opportunity to practice their reading skills while school is out of session. This helps keep the children engaged in learning over the summer months so they don't languish scholastically. For many of these children, English is a second language and it provides additional reinforcement for them. 

The church also benefits from this ministry as it provides an opportunity for children to hear the Gospel message of Jesus Christ through activities such as learning songs, reading Bible stories and even learning how to play soccer.

Brother Jim provided me with some photographs he had taken over the past summer and my wife, Kristie, had also taken some when we went out there on several occasions to play music for the kids. I had also taken some video to use for promoting the ministry, but ultimately, I didn't use it as I really wanted to keep the final video under 5 minutes long.

Here is what I ended up doing to create the video that can be viewed here.

How I Created the Video

First, I used Microsoft Photo Story 3 ( it was originally produced for Windows XP and is still available for download from Microsoft. )

Apparently, under Windows 7 it has a problem and it would not mix the background audio I wanted to use. It kept crashing. It does run under Virtual PC in XP Mode (Windows 7 Professional and higher required to run XP Mode), but if you do a "Preview" of your production, it is a bit 'choppy' on the audio portion because of the time slicing of the CPU to service the virtual machine. But, if you put your pictures in and apply the audio, and render it, it outputs just fine.

So, I ended up sequencing the photos and the photo animations using Photo Story. I'm sure you could do the same thing with the Microsoft Live Essentials Movie Maker that you can download for Windows 7, but I haven't tried it yet. I may try it just to see what I can get out of it.
 
Next, I output the video to a DV (AVI) file and pulled it into my video editor of choice, Edit Studio 6.  I use an older release of the product that was issued prior to them losing their licensing for the MPEG-2 rendering. 

I was able to edit the audio using Audacity, to copy the chorus of "Everythng is Beautiful", a song recorded by Ray Stevens in 1970, to make the song longer to match up with the video output of the photos. I also utilized the audio of another video I saw on YouTube of kids singing "Jesus Loves The Little Children"

I recorded my voice-over audio track using Audacity with my Audio Technica AT-2005 USB microphone and I used the Promptware Plus teleprompter software from Listec on my Nexus 7 to manage the output of my script so I could read all of the text I needed to read within my 5 minute limit. 

I then pulled in my audio files to Edit Studio 6 and set the levels in a music layer on the timeline for the background music and trimmed the "in" and "out" markers on the music tracks.

I then pulled in my voice-over track into a new audio layer I named "Voice-over"
 I rendered the video with Edit Studio 6 out to a DV AVI file with the audio and then I decided it would probably be a good idea to also implement the use of subtitles on the DVD for those who might be hearing impaired. There are actually two different ways to apply subtitles. You can 'hard subtitle', which actually renders the subtitles into the video or you can 'soft subtitle' which would allow you to create subtitles of multiple languages and have them rendered at the time the DVD is played.

Since this was something I had never done before, I did some digging around and I found a program called Subtitle Workshop that would allow me to preview the video and enter my script of text into subtitles with the start and ending timing notations and output a file in the SubRip SRT subtitle file format my video converter, Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate, could use to render the subtitles to do 'hard subtitling'.

I didn't like the way the subtitles were rendered with Video Converter, so I decided to investigate other methods of implementing subtitles for the DVD.

Since I had already built the .SRT file, I had all of the timings and the subtitle information for each of the 77 subtitles in the video. I did a little bit more research and found that Edit Studio 6 could do 'hard subtitling' but it didn't use a file to pull the information in, you have to create subtitle markers in the timeline at the specific points where you want the subtitles to be displayed. There was a small problem with that. 

The SubRip subtitle file timecode notation for the subtitle positions were formatted as (hh:mm:ss,fff) :

Edit Studio 6 - Subtitle Marker Dialog

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:00,000 for the start and end times.

Edit Studio 6 uses timecode notations formatted as: 

00h 00m 00s 000 for both the start and end times.

These start and end times are entered into a dialog box when creating subtitle markers in the timeline of the video, which complicated things in terms of implementing the subtitle information I already had, in Edit Studio 6. 

I figured if there was a way to convert from one timecode format to the other I could probably do it with a  Regular Expression (Regex)

I fired up my text editor EditPad Pro from JGSoft and looked at doing a Regular Expression search and replace for the ":" and "," in the input and output timings while at the same time preserving the numeric values and reformatting them to the Edit Studio 6 timecode notation. Using a companion program Regex Buddy, also from JGSoft within EditPad Pro, I was able to build and test the working regular expression 

It took me about an hour to come up with the correct Regex, which was: 
Search Regex: ([\d]*):([\d]*):([\d]*),([\d]*)  
Replace Regex: $1h $2m $3s $4 

So, I now had a new subtitle text file with the correct timings in the correct notation for Edit Studio 6. 

Next I had to create 77 subtitle markers in Edit Studio 6, on the timeline, by pressing "B" to bring up the Subtitle Marker dialog box and then copy and paste the start and end times and the subtitle text into the marker. It actually was a lot easier to do it this way than it would have been to type all of those timings and text into each marker manually.

Edit Studio 6 - Subtitle Markers above the timeline.

I then rendered the Edit Studio 6 project out to a DV AVI file with the subtitles and what you see on YouTube is the result. I actually had to render the video output twice because I didn't know I also had to set some Subtitle Properties in Edit Studio 6 prior to rendering to get it to actually output the subtitles hard-rendered into the video.

I could now take the video file with the subtitles and burn it to a blank DVD disc. 

But I wasn't finished. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided I then wanted to see if there was a way to use the SubRip SRT file I had created to build the subtitles for 'soft subtitling' with some DVD authoring software. 

The authoring software I usually use (and I really like using it) is Sony DVD Architect Studio. BUT, it turns out it DOESN'T DO SUBTITLES! What!?! $40.00 and it doesn't fully implement DVD authoring... Apparently, DVD Architect Studio is a 'subset' stand alone program of a component program built into Sony Vegas video editing software.  

So, back to Google I went and I found a really great DVD authoring tool called DVD Flick, which is FREE and it will generate subtitles using the SRT subtitle format file. It renders them beautifully. Oh, did I mention it's FREE? So, in the past 3 days I've gotten quite an education on Subtitling a DVD...

The whole project has been a blessing to me and to Brother Jim. He loved the output and he now has a video he can send out to some of the other local churches to try to garner some additional support and resources. Ideally, Redwood Baptist Church would like to expand the ministry to cover 5 different locations