I spent Friday and a few hours on Saturday editing the video that I shot for the college group at church. From noon to midnight on Friday, Luke and I attempted to edit the video using Premier on a computer in the Dungeon. (We took two hours off to eat dinner and play Taylor Golf, and Luke was programing most of the time.) Because I didn't know how to use clips to transfer the video from the MiniDV camera to the computer, it took five hours before I even started editing. Premier requires you to go through the tape marking scenes. After all the cuts are marked, the batch capture will transfer the scenes to the computer. Once I had the data on the computer, editing wasn't too bad. I was in a hurry, so I never got around to adding transitions or a sound track. As soon as I finished a basic version, I tried to create a DVD. Unfortunately, I ended up spending four hours trying to get the video in a format that the DVD authoring program would recognize. I gave up at midnight.

On Saturday, I decided (Mom helped convinced me) to come back down and finish the video, since I was supposed to show it on Saturday night. Since the ETC was open, I decided to try Final Cut on a several-year-old Mac they have. Instead of manually chopping the scenes again, I used iMovie to import the film. Since I was already in iMovie, and didn't need any of the fancy features for this movie, I never moved to Final Cut. I was able to finish the movie in less than four hours on the Mac. I thought the results were mediocre, and would have liked to spend more time on it, but everyone at church really liked it.

This afternoon, I was able to spend an hour and a half learning how to use the Canon XL1s MiniDV camera. What a great piece of equipment! It offers all the manual controls that a Canon SLR cameras have. It is very easy to use, and offers great control. It would be great to use one to film another movie. When I used the cheep camera the last two weekends, I was really disappointing with the missing features. The movie for church would have been much better if I had control over the exposure, and the wider angle lens. After fiddling with the XL1s and flipping through its manual, I think I could do very good work with one. Maybe I'll be able to convince the communications arts department to let me use it for a weekend sometime. . . .

I also got to play with the student paper's new camera and lenses. They now have two D1s and a D100. They also have Nikkor 28-70 f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S and 70-200 f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR lenses. When I was the photographer, I thought the N90s and with the 180 f/2.8 ED-IF AF, 135 f/2.8, and 28 f/2.8 AF lenses were great. I should have kept the photo editor job there the last three years. Instead, I spent way too much time on the TUSat1 project.