Better Late Than Never... I hope!

Not much news for the week. As mentioned previously, I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings videographing the annual talent show. Can’t call it videotaping, because no video tape is involved, it’s all digital!

READER ALERT: Technical Mumbojumbo follows!

I didn’t fully cover the dress rehersal on Monday evening. The event lasted a lot longer than the 1-1/2 hours predicted. More like 2-1/4 hours! I figured it was because of the frequent do-overs. Turns out that was only a part of it. Tuesday night’s performance ran 2 hours! I only had enough memory media for an hour and 55 minutes, and required multiple card changes. I missed a couple of small segments, but only one of them of any significance - Elvis’ finalé!

I ran out Tuesday morning and picked up another 2GB memory card which yields 29+ minutes of video recording time. This added to the 7GB I already had gave me enough media capacity to get the whole show plus a bunch of stills which I can sell - I hope.

Here are a couple of shot from the show:

Maxine was there!


The Director & Hubby



Elvis was in the house!


I did a “quick” edit of the Tuesday night performance to give me some idea of how much work it was going to be. The creation of the final DVD for Tuesday took about 8 hours of computer time for me. The computer actually took a couple of hours longer to render the final product and burn it to a DVD. WonderMom is letting me use her MacBook Pro for the project since it has twice the memory and double the processor speed of my ancient Powerbook G4. She’s such a sweetie! The actual time it took me to get the first DVD out was about 3 days. I’m easily distracted!

I took the DVD to the social office today to get their feedback on it and to find out how many DVDs had been ordered; 4 for Tuesday night and 32 for Wednesday night! I’d better get going on the next DVD. I also need to find a duplicating service that will fit in my $6 selling price.

I did get Wednesday night's video media loaded into iMovie today - a 2 hour chore for the Mac, not me. I love this machine! This DVD will also incorporate an audio track recorded by the sound guys. Hopefully it will provide a better audio than what the camera was able to capture. Took me 4 hours to get the audio transcribed from the cassette tape onto the computer.

Meanwhile, WonderMom is working on this neat stained glass quilt she is making for Shimmy! It is made from 13 different 15 inch square pieces of bright, jewel-tone batiks, cut into irregular polygons and rejoined with a black “grout” binding. The effect is stunning! I helped her lay out the finished blocks this morning and she has it 60% assembled. She should be able to finish it (the quilt top, not the whole quilt) tomorrow if she can sew on it most of the day. I’ll have a photo of it here next week.