Silver Case

This afternoon Luke and the dogs wanted to play in the garden. I pulled out my old Sony DCR-PC100 Handy Cam video camera. The eyepiece was still encrusted with the blood rest dust of Central Australia, reminding me that I last used it in June 2003 for the video downlink of KAP Kite Aerial Photography shooting.

I plugged in the monstrous Lithium Ion battery that i purchased for it, and the camera, surpisingly, booted up ready and willing.

I chased Luke and dogs around the garden and now i have a half hour’s footage sitting on the recorder waiting to be sucked off a firewire cable.

My question is: what video editing software should I use? Long ago I used Windows Movie Maker. When I just checked, I see the last update of it was August 2004. That doesn’t sound very inspiring, so I’m wondering if there is something else someone could recommend. I don’t want anything very complicated, just simple editing is all I require.

I tried to use my monopod as a poor man’s steadicam, but it was too light to nicely balance the video camera. I’ll dig out my heavier tripod and try that next, before I start trying to custom fabricate a weighted pole to use as one.

For as appalling as home movies are, I can see that problems are making nice pans and tracking. The zoom/wide switch on this camera is too fast by a factor of at least 10. It moves so briskly that it would only be appropriate for a movie scene where the terrorist is instantly identified in a sea of 100,000 football fans. I need to see if I can slow that factor down. The other trick I tried was not talking. No way to quicker dumbify a video than have me chattering.

update: I realized I do have Movie Maker already installed on my PC. Since the only advice I received was to use iMovie on a Macintosh I don’t own, I figured I might as well try Movie Maker.  It worked well enough for my needs.  It didn’t crash like I remember the old version doing.  Now I am recharging my batteries and thinking about what miniature movies I can make.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.