Otherwise Occupied

Update (Nov. 18): After almost a 2 ½ week delay of ignoring my blog to work on my Italy DVD, I hope to spend the next few days trying to clear up the backlog of articles that I had on the go before I started working on my DVD. I’m happy to say that the DVD was completed last weekend so I can hopefully get back to my normal routine now of spending vast amounts of my free time maintaining this web site. 🙂 …Baden

I apologize for not posting anything new for the past week. I have no fewer than 6 articles in the works that are in various stages of completion but I suspect that none of them will get done for another week or so. All of my energy is currently being poured into the production of my Excellent Italian Adventure DVD. When I came back from France last year I made a DVD out of the pictures from the trip. I bought a CD with a bunch of French music from the 30’s and 40’s and it became the soundtrack for that video. As I was carrying my new video camera as well as my digital camera on our recent trip to Italy, I have an abundance of material to work with.

I started working on the Italian DVD last weekend but part way through the effort (about 15 hours into it), I came to the conclusion that I needed to use more advanced video editing software and ended up starting over on it on Friday with Adobe Premier Elements 2.0. I’ve spent most of the weekend learning how to use Premier and it’s only been in the last few hours today that I’ve caught up to where I was in my previous software.

I think that I probably have about another 1-2 weeks of work left on the DVD and once this is finished I’ll post the full set of (still) pictures on the blog. I’m hoping that with next weekend being a long weekend that I’ll be able to get a lot done towards completion. I’ve pared down the 900 or so pictures that Peter and I took on the trip to a reasonable 320 which is what is going into the DVD.

Baden