The closer I get to finishing this thing, the more I seem to delay it. I think it's caused by a fear that it's going to suck, especially after watching the intro to the last show at the Happy Palace. It just seemed like those clips weren't very interesting, and I was starting to worry that the whole movie was going to end with a big yawn.

So today, after a month of feeling pretty unhappy with the last day, I plowed back into it again. Instead of focusing on the intro of the show, I worked on the centerpiece - the "Heather Graham Is Hot" ending song. The sound in my camera was awful that night, but luckily, John Cocci had a digital recording of the whole night. Since he used lots of mics and recorded straight to his laptop, it sounds awsome.

Going into this I was a little scared about whether there would be any drift between the camera footage and John's recording. A few years ago, I'd tried something similar, except that the audio mix was recorded to regular cassette tape, and it was a complete nightmare to get things to sync up. Although the tape sounded fine, when it was laid on top of the digital video, it was obvious that it was speeding up and slowing down subtly all the time. To compensate, I had to delete frames or duplicate frames every few seconds to try to keep the images in sync with the sound. It took me hours just to sync up the first few minutes of the one-hour recording, so I gave up after the first night.

Luckily, this wasn't a problem at all this time. Even though my camera records at 48.0 kHz and John recorded at 44.1 kHz (normal CD-quality), everything lined up just fine in the editing software.

Now I think I'm going to scrap almost all the intro cilps for that show and just focus on this last song, which does a good job of summing up the feelings of the night. The only problem is that it's 13 minutes long.