Friday, August 04, 2006

t-minus 6 hours to long weekend and counting

For various reasons that I cannot and will not go into, I don’t have much to do at work today. Well, until 1:00, and then I have a meeting. But until then, I’m pretty activity-free. This is the perfect time to write an insightful blog entry on the nature of… um… a witty blog entry on the status of… hmm…

Well, as usual, I’ve got nothing.

Our camcorder came yesterday. I was surprised; they said three weeks, and although I was expecting it to be less, I wasn’t expecting it to be that much less. Anyway, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a video camera that I got for free: it’s a cheap piece of cr— er, it’s manufactured out of feces. We took some sample videos last night, and the video was too dark to be useable. (Luckily, Windows Movie Maker can brighten it up a bit, but it doesn’t give you a whole lot of control over it, so if you try and brighten it too much, you’ll just end up washing it out. Maybe the video editing software that came with Nero will be better.) And of course, the sound isn’t great either, but that’s true for most camcorders. We’d already been thinking that we’d need to get a microphone for it.

All that being said, though, it didn’t come with a MiniDV tape for us to use, so I was just recording onto an SD card, and the camera has a bunch of features that are disabled when you’re recording to memory, including features like steadying the shot so it doesn’t look all shaky, and improving the lighting. So we’re going to pick up some MiniDV tapes today, and try again, and maybe it’ll be better than I’m thinking.

I still don’t have any ideas for any movies/videos/whatever that I want to create. Except for the driving thing; which I could probably not do anyway, because I think I’d need Andrea’s help to film it—she’d either have to drive or film, because I wouldn’t be able to do both—and she’d probably think it was a dumb idea.

Anyway, if and when I do create something, I’m sure I’ll put it in YouTube and post it here almost immediately, because I’ll be inordinately proud of myself.

2 comments:

Călin said...

you do have firewire, ? no? it is the only way to transfer video from the tapes to the computer, at full quality. USB can not handle the job. BTW, feel free to check the videos I made. The are on the youtube link in my blog.

Anonymous said...

At some point I should drive you down the Gardiner since you enjoy it so much.