October Videos!

We just got back from Portugal last Saturday, so it’s obviously been very hectic getting caught back up with real life.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a couple of videos to share.

The first is of our vacation in Portugal, the second is Maddie’s second annual pumpkin carving vlog.

I knew before we left that I wanted to try and get more active with videos again, so during our vacation I took a lot of quick little video snippets on the assumption that when we got home I could easily bundle them together into a nice little movie to share on this blog. The strategy worked out very nicely, I think.

The one thing I’d like to stress before you watch the video is that prior to this vacation Maddie had never in her life made a head-first dive into water. Ever. Early in the video you’ll see Trine and Molli coaching her into a kind of beginner’s dive: they have her squatting like a frog at the edge of the pool and basically falling head-first into the water. Watch the evolution of her dives as the vacation progresses — it was really an amazing development. Why do kids learn so much, so fast, on vacation?

There’ll be time for a lot more commentary when I finish culling the 500 photos from the trip down to a manageable number, and then writing the vacation blog post. So I’ll save everything else for that.

With respect to Maddie’s Halloween vlog, I’ve also shared that on the Facebook Family Group, so you’ve probably already seen that. I just thought it was important to have it here, too, since this is the permanent record. (And since the video here is stored on my website instead of Facebook’s servers, meaning I run no risk of suddenly losing it.)

Lastly, you’ll probably have to download them and then play them — I have no idea what happens if you’re on a mobile device and click on the links, so this will be a learning experience for all of us. (I tried pasting the URL for one of the videos into my browser, and it brought the video up right away, but it loads very slowly… if that happens to you, just pause the video and walk away for a few minutes… when you come back, it should have downloaded enough to your cache that it will play cleanly.)

I’ve noticed that our home cloud has a video streaming capability, and I may post a trial video using that service one of these days to see how it goes.

It’s fun to be working with video again… I’d kind of like to dip back into the past 5-6 years without videos and do a little catching up. But I’d also kind of like to fly around the world on a private jet.

Anyway.

Click here for our Fall Vacation in Portugal.

And/or click here for Maddie’s 2016 Halloween Vlog.

A technical note for anyone interested: I had downloaded a free and very fancy video editor for Windows 10 about a month ago and was very excited about its capabilities. But after playing around with it a little I realized it was much more powerful than I needed it to be, and the power came with a high cost in terms of usability. It’s a great tool, and would be perfect if I were setting out to make theatrical shorts, but since I’m mainly interested in grinding out quick-and-dirty little snippets for family and friends, I thought an application that complicated to use would probably just end up diminishing my enthusiasm for making videos. So I found another, simpler, more limited app — “Movie Edit Touch” — which is designed for Windows 10 machines with touch screens. It’s super easy to use, has most of the same kinds of features I’m used to from the old days with Windows MovieMaker, and the fact that I can edit and produce videos without even using a keyboard or mouse is just icing on the cake. Maybe now and then I’ll feel compelled to make a movie that needs more sophisticated editing tools: when those times come, I’ll be happy to fall back on HitFilm4 Express. But I strongly endorse Movie Edit Touch for anyone else with a Windows 10 machine, regardless of whether you have a touch screen.