Day: June 14, 2006

Well, it took a while to happen, but at last it finally did: I filled every tape, and every memory stick, with video and still photos from the new camera. My wife scored me a stash of cheap DVD-Rs from the local freight store last week (I haven’t had any blank DVDs for a while now), so last night I ran at least 4 hours of video off to DVD (most of it horses and baby horses, or Olivia in action, or, if she was asleep, Olivia inaction), and copied almost all of the photos from my largest memory stick (256 megs) off to my hard drive. I was amazed at how many pictures I had taken – by far, the most frequent photographic subject with my camera is anything with four legs, and within that category, Chloe and Olivia were in the lead. I’m glad there are as many photos of Chloe as there are. I always said Chloe beauty shots were easy (all you need is Chloe and a camera), and the same is proving to be true of Olivia, although in her current “little kid” state there are plenty of utterly goofy moments in with the beauty shots (see the row of dancing Olivias in one of my previous entries from this week). 😆
I was surprised that there were nearly two full hours of Boss, and almost as much as some of the other horses and their fillies. In all, I now how four one-hour tapes to reuse, and one memory stick; I still need to dump the vast majority of the Boss still pictures, my photos from last year’s CGE, and much more. Once all this stuff is dumped off to the hard drive, it’s time to burn a CD-R or two (or maybe even a DVD-R, since we’re talking about a bunch of memory sticks that each hold at least a hundred megs). It may also pay to think about dumping video not only straight to the DVD recorder, but also to AVI files for future editing purposes. At that point, I’ve got to start figuring out an organizational system for keeping track of everything, which starts to make it sound like a project at the station.
I think it’s safe to say I’ve been getting plenty of use out of this camera. (The statistics above don’t include the tape that I recorded over and over and over again with footage from various video and computer games to create the flash movies in the Phosphor Dot Fossils section.) I also now have the docking station (shown in the above photo) permanently hooked up to Zen, and editing software on the same machine, so I can continue to throw gobs of video at you. (Considering how massive the “multimedia” column to your right is becoming, I may have to figure out something, like a second blog just for the high-bandwidth stuff. 😯 )
So was this camera worth the money a year ago? Oh hell yeah.… Read more