Adventures in Videoland
January 2nd, 2010
A few years back I decided to try my hand at putting together a video for a song I made with my friend Aaron Nielsen. At the time I was working on Windows PC and so I put together the video using Windows Movie Maker.
It didn’t take long to learn the ropes and after 2 or 3 days of working obsessively on the project, I exported the movie and uploaded it to YouTube. For a first attempt I was very pleased with the results. Actually, this wasn’t exactly my first time working with video. Back in high-school I went on a field trip to York where I used a VHS Camcorder to capture footage of the trip, which we watched as a group on return to school. There was no editing involved – so the emphasis was on capturing the footage, but still, it was a nice introduction and gave me a taste for working with video.
A few years later, while in College/University I helped a friend record and edit footage from a trip to Europe. It was sometime between 1992 and 1993, and by that time camcorders were already smaller than they were 4 years earlier in high-school – now using compact Hi-8 tapes in favour of the much larger VHS format. As for editing the footage, it was all done using tape-to-tape with a console like the one below for controlling the source and destination reels.
It was quite some before I had the chance to film/edit again – my Mom bought me a Sony Handycam which I used on several occasions, although nothing ever made it to “production” since I had no way to edit the footage at the time. My Intel 486 computer could just about handle email and Instant Messaging, not much more.
Back (or forward) to 2007 and I was at it again, this time using Windows Movie Maker and a large selection of video clips I had been recording for the past year or so since I got a Sony Cybershot (again from my Mom) which output in digital MPEG format. How things have changed!
Shortly after I produced the echotel – Not Easy video Microsoft launched Windows Vista and with it, a new version of Movie Maker. I made a few more movies, some of which are on YouTube, some of which are in the vaults along with those old Hi- tapes and so much other material I’ve yet to revisit.
As far as the rest of it goes, well I’m starting off the new year with a new blog-category: Adventures in Videoland. This post, appropriately titled the same, is the first of what I hope will be an interesting and engaging record of what I discover and learn as I go from Windows to Mac, Movie Maker to iMovie, to Final Cut Express and perhaps beyond. At this point I’ve been using iMovie HD for a little while and have quite a few things to say about the switch from iMovie HD to iMovie 08 and why I’m currently looking for a trial version of Final Cut Express as a move forward.
For now I’ll leave it at that because I have to go back to clearing space on my storage drive and trying to find that trial version of FCE. Apple appears to be either hiding it or there just isn’t one, which might be a sneaky way of getting me to simply put out the cash to buy it. “Go on! You know you want to!”
To round off this post, I’m including 2 videos I made recently in iMovie HD.