Wednesday, January 23, 2013

New Blog















I've pondered for a long time on starting a new blog. Seems a little silly considering no one reads the first one. My interest in photoshop has been waning the past year as my renewed interest in sewing and needle arts has breathed new life.  I had to consider that it could veer off again in any direction, so I didn't want a strictly needle art blog.  It seemed more reasonable to keep it labeled "creative" something.  Since so much of LIFE interferes with so much of my creative urges, I named it "creative spurts and trickles".  Maybe I keep this one for photoshop tutorials, maybe not.  But I'd like to do some sewing tutorials and discussion and it doesn't fit here.  So, I'm going there.  I haven't got any design yet, but some stuff I can do better here at my pc, and some stuff from my laptop at work (where I have large chunks of time that I need to devote strictly to staying awake in anyway quietly possible).

Time for some "life" stuff........ewwwww, laundry.


Monday, January 7, 2013

Video Editing

GRRRRRR! I can't get the blogger tool to let me upload from my pc today!!!

Was September really my last entry?  Wish I could brag about being busy with lots of exciting stuff, but I can't.  I am still forging ahead with my sewing renaisance, albeit slowly.  It's ok, I'm 52, I can do ANYTHING as slow as I want now :).  I knew I'd finally start growing into this stage of human development, the "mature" stage.  Anyway......

Yesteday I started working on some video.  For years my cameras and phones have had the ability to take video and they are getting better and better.  I knew the day would come when I'd have to start dabbling in editing some of that.  The day finally got here.  I had about 8 clips of babies running around in my house that I wanted to put together in some kind of pleasing manner.  A short, easy project, the equivalent of a potholder as a first sewing project, a cake mix for a novice in the kitchen.

First I looked to see what programs I might already have to help out.  Elements would let me download premier for 30 free days, but I had no intention of buying it. I didn't want to try it and like it.   I run widows vista on my home pc and windows 7 on my laptop, both had a windows movie maker.  I also searched online and found a free for home use program called VideoPad from NCH.

I started with the windows movie maker that came with Vista.  Getting the short videos clipped together with nice transitions was easy.  I did one on the home machine, and then another later on my laptop,  The 7 edition also had a nice effect choice of pan and zoom auto movie mode that really worked nice with my amature shooting skills.  When I got home and discovered that feature wasn't on the vista version, I tried to import the newer film onto the older program, no dice.  Then when I asked the windows movie viewer to play the newer video, it really all blew up. I had to run system restore to go back into either the maker or viewer on that machine. 

When I got to adding an audio clip (a nice, sappy Tim McGraaw, My little girl) the hands down winner was Video Pad.  I didn't want to eliminate the audio from the original clips, lots of baby voices and parents and grandparent, dog yipping- but I wanted the sappy song to be the major audio component.  Video pad had a much better audio editor.

I'm scared to post the result. I don't want Tim McGraaw coming after me for republishing his song.  I paid my 99c on Amazon for it, but I believe that only covered personal use.

POST NOTE:  I finally got the editor to let me upload from Picassa, not my computer.  The pic was edited in photoshop elements for cropping, some cloning out distracting background, and a quick fix of saturation/exposure, etc.  Then I took it to camera bag and applied the "light leak" effect and framed it in white, duh, doesn't show on this page!  The pants were sewn by me from a lovely pattern from Made by Rae, her big butt baby pants.  LOOOOVVVE this pattern.  My sewing itch has been so scratched by the wealth of motivators online that I'm going to have to start another blog soon.  I'm sewing and excited about it.