October 27, 2006

It has come to my attention that my feedback page has been non-functional for quite some time. If you tried to contact me using this page in the last 12 months, your message has been lost and I did not receive it (whoops!). I have fixed the problem, and you can now be assured that I will receive whatever you decide to say. Also, just a note, if you want me to be able to respond to you, please include your email address as part of your message.

August 2, 2006

Have you ever seen those videos I made when Rian was a baby? If you haven't, you should. Well, you should if you like short, poor-quality videos. Otherwise just stick to your cable TV. Anyway, I made those videos about three years ago, and shortly after I made them, my digital camcorder stopped working, leaving me unable to create any more videos.

So I gave up on video for awhile and bought a nice digital camera and just took lots of pictures. I was going through my closet recently and stumbled upon my digital camcorder. I pulled it out and started testing different things to see if I could get it to work again. Unfortunately, I had no such luck.

I started to consider buying a new digital camcorder, and emersed myself in digital camera reviews on the Internet. After a couple days of this, I got a reply to an email I had sent Panasonic tech support. They suggested trying a dry head cleaner. So we went to Target and picked one up for under $20. I got home and popped the head cleaner in. After several attempts I finally got my camcorder to play back some video for me. I was back in business!

I started shooting some video with Rian, and when I was done I wanted to put the video on my computer for editing. Years ago when I made the aforementioned videos, I used Adobe Premiere for editing, which is a professional-grade video editor. Unfortunately, I no longer had Premiere installed, and didn't want to go install it for a variety of reasons I won't mention here. The easiest way for me to get the video onto my computer for editing was to use Windows Movie Maker, so I decided to use that.

Windows Movie Maker has definitely improved since the last time I used it, but for someone that is accustomed to working in Premiere, Windows Movie Maker feels like a child's toy. I found myself unable to do a lot of things that were easy to do in Premiere, and the software's simplicity left me unable to make small adjustments here and there to make the final product exactly how I wanted it. Probably the biggest challenge with using Movie Maker was the software's lack of stability. The first night I started working with it I experienced about 10 crashes. The second night it crashed even more, but by the third night I had figured out that I needed to be more delicate in using it, and it only crashed once or twice.

But I did what I could with the software I had, and the finished product is... well, I'll let you be the judge. Without further ado, here it is: Rian: A Brief Recap. The running time is 3:48. Download size: 12.8 MB. There is also a low quality version that is only 4.1 MB.