Jemma's 6th Birthday Party

Jemmas birthday part was at 3pm Sunday afternoon in Nixon park.

These pictures are not in any particular order

Megan was down with the flu but still managed to put together this lovely mango cheese cake.

We played some games including the parachute game. 

Treasure hunt is always a stressful time for any party manager.  Chris, Callan & Liam put out the treasure.  A couple of boys discovered the treasure and pre collected a significant portion.  Bob helped to convince them to return it however of course once they were given the nod, they immediately colelcted more than everyone else put together.  The rest of us were reduced to actually searching.

Tunnel ball

Opening Presents - Yea.

It was an equal opportunity party.

Video Editing Programs

This is a page where I will review various video editing programs.  The need to identify a new editing program has arishen for several reasons

1  I bought a new High Definition Camcorder and

2  Chris has shown renewed interest in making Lego Animations.

So lets start with the programs that I use.

Premiere 6.  

This is the benchmark as far as I am concerned.  I find it easy to use and it has a reasonable number of features.

The negatives are:-

Does not create DVDs.

Can not edit MPEG or High Definition Video from my new camcorder.

Does not read in lots of still JPEG images.

The positives are

Multiple Time line tracks.

Easy Razor tool to cut video.  Other timeline tools work as you would expect.

Premiere Elements 4

The positives are

Creates robust DVDs

Renders and uploads to Youtube.

The negatives are:

I hate the user interface. 

DVD renderer requires activation

Serif Movie Plus X3  (~$AU100)
 The positives are
The version I downloaded when I purchased it, is actually the most uptodate.
Timeline based with Multiple tracks
It will read in multiple still images >250

 The negatives are:
 There does not seem to be a way to select all the items on one track from the edit point forward.
There does not seem to be a ripple delete function.  That is to remove blank space from betweem two clips on the same track and then shift all tracks back by this amount.
There is too much margin around the "monitor".  Actualy there is quite a bit of screen space wasted around various things plus you cant resize the various panes independantly.

Magix Movie Edit Pro 16 Plus

http://www.magix.com/gb/movie-edit-pro/plus/

Jahshaka

Free / Source forge has negative comments on source forge.  Claimed to be replaced http://www.cinefx.org/downloads/

.cinefx.org

Installed but would not run.  Gave up

 

 

Chris's Birthday

Today is Chris's birthday.  I actually had the day off but not because it was his birthday.  I was sick.  Some sort of flue.  Headache, shoulder ache.  Very dry mouth.  Drank tones of water.

Anyway back to the task at hand.  I raised myself from the depths of ..... and partook of a small meal of roast beef and vegies.  Could not bring myself to have the very tasty looking chocolate pudding.  Megan put a couple of candles in at and se sung "Happy Birthday".








This was Monday

 Now on Satrday Night, Chris had a few friends over for a sleepover.
 The boys set up their mattresses in the games room down stairs.  In the evening they watched "Lego Clutch Powers".  In the morning, they hooked the video projector up to the PS3 and played "Modnation Racers"

 Cut the cake









Chris is into Lego in a big way.  Last Saturday, his friend Mitch and Chris filmed a lego animation which you can watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSApFDLHk7Y  So it was only fitting that he received a big bucket of Lego as his birthday present.  He also got a music book of songs for his saxophone.

Legomation Saga

On Sunday, Chris and his friend Mitch decided to make a Legomation movie.  I provided some tech support but it took far too much effort. 

Chris and Mitch did all the scripting, planning and taking of the still photos.  I then set to work to work out how to read the still images into the computer and form them into a video.  Menwhile Mitch and Chris used Audacity (A free audio program) to record the soud and trim it down.  I was still messing around with the video when the sound files arrived as WAV files.  They had numbered and named them so I knew in which order they were to be placed.

OK so the plan had been to read the stills into windows movie maker and have windows moviemaker render a DV format file that would be read into Adobe premiere 6. The audio would then be grafted in.  This plan had been chosen because this had worked in the past. This plan came unstuck when Movie Maker would not save in DV format.  Whenever I chose that option it would just hang. 

Now I really like Premiere 6 however it has a few issues and is a bit old.  For some reason it hangs when reading in the still images and it also can not create DVDs.

There was an additional hassle that Premeiere Elements 4 requires one to go online to activate the DVD section.  So at midnight when I go to make the DVD, I find its not acticated on the computer I was using.  And b%^$#dy Adobe's activation site was down for maintenance.  So I had to move the not insignificant file via an external hard disk to a computer that is barely working in order to render the DVD.

I also own Premeiere Elements 4.  I hate the user interface.  However it does create good DVDs and as it turns out it was able to read in the still images.  So the procedure we used in the end was
1.  Read still images into Premiere Elements 4  (Start by setting the default still image duration to 5 frames)
2.  Save the movie in DV format
3.  Open Premiere 6.  Read in the file.  Place on time line.
4.  Read in all the audio files.
5.  Place the first audio segment on the timeline starting at the right position.
6.  Find the last piece of video associated with this audio.  Cut using Razor tool.  Drag video on the timeine until the start lines up with the end of the audio.
7.  Look back through the video and choose a chunk to replicate to fill the gap.  Slice with the razor tool.
8.  Fill the gap in the video by copying and pasting chunks of video.
9.  Repeat for each audio segment.
10. Save as DV format.
11.  Read into Premiere Elements 4
12.  Create DVD.
13.  I also saved it with Cinepack and some other codec onto a USB memory stick for PC replay.