I videotaped The Boy’s game this past Saturday and made a quick attempt at editing it down to his better highlights last night. The results are less than satisfactory.
My camera skills need work. I’m not used to watching everything through the viewfinder and have a tendency to look up from the camera when there’s more action. Of course, this means that the camera stays where I last looked or ends up pointing at the grass or something.
The transfer is crappy as well. I’m not sure why, but there’s a lot of pixel noise and distortion. I don’t think it’s on the original tape, so I might try to use different quality settings. I’m using Windows Moviemaker which comes free with WinXP and I let it choose the settings on this attempt. Also, since Moviemaker only outputs to WMV and AVI files, this is a problem for the non-Windows viewing audience (Jaja). I may spring for Quicktime Pro and try that out.
The cheesy music is an attempt to drown out my lame dad comments during the game. The Wife made fun of me for the music selection. At least I didn’t add titles, yet…
You’ll either need the latest windows media player (windows | mac) or something else that’ll play WMV files. If you’ve got WindowsXP, you’ve already got the media player, but you may need to download the newer version or codec updates if you have problems playing the file (sound with no picture usually means you don’t have the right codec). You can get those through windows update. Also, be warned that it’s a fairly large file at almost 9 MB. Now that I’ve finished with all of the excuses and disclaimers, here it is (he’s number 15).