Differing perspectives

For once I just don't see the point.

In the wake of the Sony PSP stampedes, a chap in England has shelled out almost £8000 on ebay to secure himself a one. According to the report this now gives him the ability to surf the web, download music and videos and watch movies.

Well last time I checked, my little PC can do all of these things for a lot less money. It may fall short in the state-of-the-art gaming department, but for the money I saved I can do 'reality' thrills. I can go snowboarding, wakeboarding, skydiving, paintballing or clay pigeon shooting. Alternatively I can experience safer thrills in a theme park or a holiday in Vegas. I can travel to far off lands or if I really wanted some pixelated hand-eye coordination, I could buy a £1 TV tennis unit in stunning orange at the bootfair down the road, where I know I'll get as much game-play as I would playing the latest incarnation of Grand Theft Auto.

OK so I know this isn't my bag and as Mr John has just pointed out, some people would view actually leaving the house to go snowboarding as abhorrent. But even so, £8000 when he could just wait a month or so...

Main Feature : Les Bicyclettes de Bracknell

Another quick movie, this time it's the Thames cycle action stitched together into some semblance of a story. Locations start at Bracknell and include Putney Bridge, Richmond Park, various locks, Hampton Court Palace and finally into Staines.

CD Flies In

Having got myself a waterproof stills camera that also manages pretty reasonable video, I found myself looking at video editing software again. The first hurdle was that the files in the W10 were ".MOV" format and would not import into any of the DV editing programs I had installed. After much faffing around trying to convert them without much success, I tried simply renaming the files with a ".AVI" extension and was amazed to find that they worked. I don't really know the ins and outs of media wrappers but the main thing is that I can now take movies on the camera and easily chuck them at a non-linear editor for tidying up before vlogging them.

Now the last time I made a movie from my DV camera footage I was using the excellent budget editing package "EditStudio" from Pure Motion. However, it always seemed to suffer from being tediously slow to move clips about and refresh the screen etc. Not sure why but it did. The situation was even worse with these new (non-DV) files, so today I sought out an alternative and settled on Sony's Vegas Video. I've had my eye on this software ever since Sonic Foundry brought out the original version. I was (and am still) using Sound Forge 4.0 back then for audio editing, so I also get the benefit of compatibiltiy between applications.

I grabbed a few clips, dropped them into the timeline and threw a rough-edited audio track into the mix. Around an hour later a short movie was winging its way to this website. Bonza!

Big In Banff

OK, now we're cooking on gas. Behold the infamous 1999 snowboard holiday movie Big In Banff. This was my very first effort at digital video editing so cut it some slack if you will. Apologies also for video quality, as although this was shot on a Sony DV cam, it was captured via an analogue composite video lead, stored on the hard drive as low-res M-JPEG and later converted to DivX before being uploaded to YouTube, where it's been re-compressed into goodness knows what.
Warning : those eating food should cease viewing after the "redrum will return" message.

Tahoe Movie

Since Ho has kindly uploaded my Tahoe Season Round-up movie to YouTube, I thought it only sensible to post it here.
Tahoe (and beyond) was something we all saw the point in to the highest degree. We focussed on that point down to a sub-atomic level. Like three little quarks, we went up the lifts, and down the mountain from top to bottom, impressed by its strange charm.
The time : 2004/2005 Winter Season. The Place : Lake Tahoe & Virginia City. The Score : "Burn Baby Burn" by Ash(2001).