In 1995 we decided to go to our American friends in California. Ann mentioned that it would be nice to have some live pictures from there as a complement to the ordinary photos. I saw the opening and took a chance and the next day I had ordered my first video camera - a Hi8 Canon UC2X.
Since then I have added two 3-ccd digital camcorders - one Canon XL1 and one Canon XM1(GL1)
I am very active now trying to make pleasant movies to show friends.
One has to remember that not all of your friends are interested and that never show them something that lasts too long. Most people can probably manage 25 or 30 minutes but not more.
You will soon find out whether there are friends with a more genuine interest and concentrate on them. Fortunately I have three of those. Video editing can be expensive. It all depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it. I wrote a short article about this which you may read at
About video in Seniornet Sweden
Unfortunately it is in Swedish.
I have also learned from experience that it is not enough with technical knowledge if you want to make good video. The difficult things are, as I see it, two - creativity and the ability to present what you want to show in a pleasant and interesting way.
My way to video editing was as follows.
Since I had computer knowledge from my time at work I chose to order a high performance computer running under Windows
NT and my choice of compenents.
I installed a Truevision Targa 1000 digitizing board. With that I could digitize
the video signal coming from the Hi8 VCR and store the digital video on my hard disks
in real time. This requires high performance hard disks so I had to acquire very fast external disks intended for video. Digital video with the quality I want takes up about 4 Mb of disk space per second so I have now
increased the size of my discs to 440Gb with four hardiscs. I have also upgraded
the computer to a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1Gb of RAM.
When the video is in the computer you want to be able to edit so I had to buy an editor and chose one of the most common
ones on the market - Adobe Premiere. With this editor you will be able to edit your footage and it is up to your own imagination and ability what the result will be. You can join and mix clips in a number of ways, you can superimpose clips and you can add animation and still images of your choice as well as text and rolling credits and much more. You can also choose to mix up to 99 sound tracks and also do some sound editing.
When you are satisfied with the movie you can save it to a VHS, S-VHS or miniDV recorder. You can also save your finished movie in other formats like AVI for the PC or QuickTime for the Mac. There are also ways to save movies in the new MPEG formats that are used in DVD.
Recently I substituted a Canopus DV Storm2 for my Canopus DV Rex M1 board which gives me both digital and analog video on the same
board in RT. I
have also upgraded Windows NT to Windows XP professional.
If you are interested in this field do not hesitate to contact me via email.