Private Thoughts Made Public

It’s about time I mentioned one of my favourite hobbies on this blog. No, not that one, the other one. Digital Video Editing. I first got into this about three years ago when a product called Edit Studio appeared on a magazine cover disc. I’d had a camcorder since about 1990, and had always tried to make my recordings watchable by editing it straight onto a VHS tape. But the idea of being able to edit videos on a computer, to do it properly and make it look really professional really appealed to me. My son was 18 months old at the time so I had lots of things to film
I was hooked straight away. I’ve kept with Edit Studio, because it does everything I need it to do, and doesn’t cost the earth. The service and support is first rate, as well, which counts for a lot these days. As soon as I could afford it I got a digital camcorder which not only improved the picture quality, but also made it easier to get the video on to the computer in the first place, and I could copy the edited video back to a DV Tape to copy to VHS later.
With the latest version of Edit Studio, the guys at Pure Motion wrote a Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows you to write your own effects which you can then plug in to the program. Being no good at C++ however meant I was not able to write my own effects. I had to suggest ideas to other people who spent time and effort converting my ideas into something usable. A couple of these ideas (bounce and origami) were developed by Tracy at Rosa Negra. Then a very enterprising chap called Jamie Mueller wrote an effect he called “General Expression”. The idea behind this effect is that you could specify your own mathematical formula to define what happened to the video. I spent last weekend writing a couple of effects (“one pin” and “meltdown”). It’s extremely time-consuming, but it keeps me off the streets hehehe. This is one reason why I haven’t updated the blog for a while, I’ve been busy elsewhere.
I’ve also been evaluating DVD-Lab, which lets me put my finished movies onto a DVD with menus and everything else, and as soon as I can afford it I’m going to get a copy of that as well. I already have a DVD writer, but all I’m using it for is to make backup copies of my son’s DVD’s, in case the originals get scratched. For this I use DVD Shrink, a very neat little freebie that recompresses the data on a DVD and makes it all fit onto a single layer disc.
Now all I need to do is catch up on the three and a half hours of unedited video currently sitting on my hard drive!