MX Glory Days

Bauer wrote:

Here's a video I made earlier this year for our Old SoCal Pro Reunion. It's basically a visual history of the most important decade in motocross...

Here's a video I made earlier this year for our Old SoCal Pro Reunion. It's basically a visual history of the most important decade in motocross history, mainly cuz it's the one I raced in...LOL. I went through every issue of the Cycle News archives (available online!) from 1970 to 1980 and pulled photos and headlines with any of the racers that were coming to our party. My plan was to burn a shitload of DVDs to give out to the people who were in the video, which turned out to be approx 60 discs.

Figured it would be easy, just set the pics to music, piece of cake. Yeah, right.

First off, figure that three minutes to go through each one of over 500 issues of Cycle News is 25 hours, and I probably spent at least five minutes on each of them...not including getting sidetracked reading all the cool stories. I ended up with over 1200 photos, including a lot of great advertisements that I had to edit out. Then cropping and cleaning up each one, figuring out which ones to use and where. Other than a few songs where I used specific pictures, I wanted to have them run in no particular order, but since I'd clipped them chronologically, that's how the files were numbered. The only way I could figure to shuffle them up was to sort them by file size, which did mix them up, but not as well as I'd have liked. Believe me, when you have that many pictures you can't just pick and choose, because they're not spread out across a room in front of you...you can only see what's on your screen. You go back to find a pic that you saw a minute ago and it takes forever to find it.

I'm sure there are pro-style software programs that will take your photo files, randomize them and insert them perfectly into the playlist of songs that you choose, but I'm a masochist, so I used Windows Movie Maker and it sucks balls. I configured the timing sequencing for every photo, trying to time the transitions in some sort of relation to the music and it's a bitch. You would not believe how much difference one tenth of a second makes! As you watch and listen, also please consider that my sense of rhythm is about like Steve Martin's in "The Jerk", so cut me some slack!

After probably more than a hundred hours spent making this thing over a three week period, I ran out of time and found myself burning CDs all night and all morning, right up till I left for the party! It played on a continuous loop inside the house till 1:00 am and everyone seemed to like it. A few people said their DVD wouldn't play on their home players and Glover called to say his wouldn't play on a Mac. He was able to dig up a PC and called back to say that he really enjoyed it...of course he did, he's everywhere in the fucking thing! LOL, I love Broc! Mikey Tripes called and said his wouldn't play, but I think I talked him through it.

Anyway, I uploaded it to You Tube today, check it out if you want. It's an hour long, but it has some great music so you can just let it run in the background...there are also a couple of tribute songs and one song where I slipped in some personal shots...deal with it! LOL! Like I said, I ran out of time making it, so there are things I would have fixed. Here you go:

My Empire of Dirt: A decade of motocross as seen through the pages of Cycle News