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Wednesday, June 5, 2002 |
Video Editing Adventures 
Last night, my stepson returned from a friend's house with about 10 minutes of very raw video footage on a VHS tape for a school project. It needed some cutting room work. I ran out to Staples to pick up a cheap video capture board, and I bought the only one they had in stock: the bargain-priced Hauppauge WinTV-GO. I had no joy with Windows XP (MovieMaker could import video, but no audio), so at my wife's suggestion, I dropped it into a different machine (one running Windows 2000), and that worked.
My network was slow, and it was difficult to move the large video file to the Windows XP computer for editing. So, I cruised around Google Groups and looked at what people were saying about video editing software. I gathered that some folks considered Roxio's VideoWave to be superior to MovieMaker, so I downloaded the trial version. It worked well; my stepson was soon editing his video, inserting fades, titles, and credits. By 12:00am, the video was complete, and we were wrestling with how to get it back onto a VHS tape so he could show it to his class today. I dug out an Asus GeForce2 MX200 with video-out that I'd been saving for such an occasion, and by 1:30am, the project was complete.
This is the first school-project-related emergency of my parenting career, and it was a lot of fun. As a bonus, now we've got a nice little makeshift video editing workstation we can all play with! As far as the software, I like VideoWave, but I think its user interface is a bit clunky. I'd like to try using a Macintosh for video work, so I hope to experiment with iMovie soon. Last night, I had enough trouble trying to move the big file across my uncooperative network that I just wanted to keep everything on the PC where I captured the video. When I have the luxury of time, I'm usually more adventurous.
3:34:39 PM 
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I like any excuse I can find to get up to Brattleboro. Not only is it a stone's throw from Keene, where I have a lot of family that I like to visit, but Brattleboro is a great little city. For some reason, my visits there always put me at ease (something in the air?). Several years ago, I visited Brattleboro and stayed at the Latchis Hotel. When I got back home (at the time, I was living in Providence), I was gripped with the urge to rent an apartment in Brattleboro for a few months and do all my work from there. I realized that the general form of this urge was to leave the city, and I ended up moving back to the town where I grew up, South Kingstown. Not long after the move, I met my wife, so I have no regrets about not moving to Brattleboro (and I credit the good vibes of that town for getting me out of the city). And it's still near the top of my list (along with Keene) of places I'd like to retire to.
10:34:24 AM
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Jon is speaking the What's Next Conference in Brattleboro, Vermont. It sounds like an interesting conference, and it's quite affordable. I'm tempted to head up there and check it out, but my workload will probably keep me tethered to my desk.
10:25:05 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brian Jepson.
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