Last week seemed to be a week full of interruptions – either having to stop work early or start late, or not being able to do the work I was supposed to do because I didn’t have the information I needed.

I got a lot done, but it was all chopped into segments – I spent the week wondering what should I do with this hour, or that 20 minutes, or what I should do while I’m waiting for that email, or this delivery.

Still, I did remarkably well. I got this months’ newsletters written – the company I write the newsletters for has suddenly sold off the arm producing one of the products I write about (a TV receiver for computers) and decided to concentrate on their video editing products. This is good news for me because obviously video editing is more my speciality. Also, there’s less and less to write about USB TV receivers and I really struggle to do a 400 word feature about a different aspect of them every month.

Conversely, concentrating the newsletter on editing makes a lot of sense because it means I can do two features per month – one aimed at novice users and done as a “push this button then push that button” style tutorial, and one more discursive feature that forms part of a series on something a bit more meaty.

I’m starting a five part series on documentary filmmaking – which should be fun.

I’m also toying with the idea of doing a filmmaking competition for users of the product… hmm.. might be fun.


Anyway, the newsletter’s out of the way, for this month. As is a feature I’m writing for PC plus on basic photo editing.


yachts
I also managed to do most of the work on re-doing the scenes that didn’t work in the yacht safety animation I’m doing for a luxury yacht… this project is nearing completion. Right now, I’m rendering out what I hope will be a final version (although once I check through it and give it to the client, there’s bound to be a few tweaks).

Anyway, that’s a long term project and it’s good to see it finally on the way to completion. There comes a time in every project when you’ve made all the creative decisions and done all the fun work, and it becomes about just getting the thing out of the door.

With this project, though, my last few days work on it have been (as well as re-doing some pesky animation shots that just won’t go right) putting in bought in sound effects and music – and that’s actually quite fun.

In contrast to the trilobites project finished a couple of weeks ago, adding sound effects to this animation has worked really well. I guess it’s a mixture of the fact that this project’s a little bit more comical and less realistic, so I can afford for the effects to be a little less naturalistic and the fact that it’s a lot easier to come across the sound of an alarm siren, or someone falling into the water than it is to re-create sounds made by an underwater creature that died out 300million years ago…

Castles
The castle animation seems to have been well received – and I now just have to add people, animals and a bit more animation to the movie. I think I’ve now got the details I need to do that. I’m going to buy in clothes and use them on poser characters because it’s a lot easier and will be more realistic than modelling everything from scratch.

Wedding videos
I also managed to upload the footage shot in Mexico to my new 8gb PC and install CS3 on it. This was a version of CS3 that was on my previous PC that totally crashed a few months ago, and I thought I’d have trouble installing it because there’s some de-registration process you have to go through before you can put it on a new machine. If the old machine is broken, you can’t de-register it….

Still, I installed it and for some reason it seemed to work….

And as a bonus, when I captured all my footage, there were no jumps in it.

I’ve been worried for a while that my HDV camcorder was breaking down because I kept getting jumps appearing in my captured footage. It turns out that this was just because my PC (a 2gb dual core) was too slow (or maybe the disk drives I was capturing to or the firewire port I was importing through)…. Whatever, the problem seems to have been solved by simply getting a new PC.

Who’d have thought it would be that easy.

Just replace everything and suddenly it works.


Anyway, the problem this problem has been replaced by is that the new PC keeps randomly crashing after it’s been on a few hours…. Hmmm… don’t like the sound of that.

Still, I did manage to edit together the interviews I took at Jake the digger’s wedding and upload them to youtube for him. Not actually work, but it did allow me to make sure everything was working on the new system before I had to do any critical editing work!