The Making Of...

OK, so I put some of my relaxation time in Ireland over Christmas to good use, and edited my footage from Fernie last season. I'm happy that I've done it, because had it not been done before I go to Morzine it might not have been done at all. Plus, I don't like keeping loads of huge video files hanging around on disk; 1. I've got the physical tapes as backup, and 2. In all the time I've been snowboarding, I've never gone back to the raw footage after making an edit. So now I can delete it.

But before I post the video I want to comment on the process of making it.

Movie Maker and I is starting to become a love-hate thing. I really appreciate the fact that it's free, but apart from that, I hate it. It's been a pain.

Not knowing how the Movie Maker software manages memory, I can only be angry at the net result. Once I got to the point where the sequence was getting around 2 - 3 minutes long, my laptop became unable to smoothly play it through. I was running out of memory. It was slow and frustrating, and often needed restarting.

Sure, my laptop has only 1GB of ram, but my older laptop, supposedly inferior to this one, also had 1GB of ram. I edited the last two sequences I put together on that laptop using Premier Pro, and never experienced a problem. Maybe it's just this new laptop that sucks? I don't know.

Whatever the reason, both CPU and memory were being eaten up big time during the editing process, and it sucked. I feel like I need a new laptop, or better software, or both... but then again, I think I'd rather shred for another week or two this season than buy a load of computer stuff. Bah!

With the regards to the aspect ratio issues I had last time, that's something I can't knock Movie Maker for. I recall that my camera isn't true widescreen; the chips are all actually 4:3 - the panasonic simply clips the top and bottom off. Both Movie Maker and Premier export my footage in 4:3. I guess when I tell Movie Maker that I'm working with 16:9 it does the same thing and clips the display... the frames are still 4:3 however, so after exporting, I'm stuck with black bars with either YouTube or Vimeo. No biggie.