The journey to the north

A while back I went to my home town. A road trip with a full car to help my friend settle into a new town. Being there really brought back memories, and unlike being in Melbourne, which is beautiful, cosmopolitan, and bustling, I really felt peaceful, a calmness that I hadn't felt since being in Long Xuyen.

Along the way I managed to shoot some photos and videos. On Sunday, I decided it was time to get cracking on one of my projects I had thought about for a while - Showing the world how different Australia is. And a journey from the bottom to the central eastern coast has a lot of variation. Unfortunately when we got to the mountains it was dark and raining so I didn't get any pictures of this variation in landscape. Just imagine mountains with rain forest and lots of steep winding roads.

This is my first decent project with the Premier Video editing software. I am pretty impressed with the way it turned out, yet couldn't find the Star Wars transitions, although some karaoke regulars might notice some of the karaoke transitions present. I wanted to do the Indiana Jones type maps where the map scrolls in the background over the foreground, yet I didn't have the patience to find out how to do it. I did a quick variation which I think does the job.

I opened the soundbooth program for the first time and found it a bit ordinary. I quickly reverted back to soundforge yet found that I forgot what i was looking to do and went back to the open soundbooth program. After a short look I found an icon which looked like what I wanted to do and by trial and error I got the basic results I was after. I have to say with all the functions in soundforge it was overwhelming, and soundforge still looks more versatile than soundbooth.

Also with this project I have worked out how to encode the final vidoes better and keep the quality a little higher than the first attempt at making a video. Well here it is a video diary of the journey north.

Enjoy!

Adobe Master Collection

I have been lucky enough to get a hold of the Adobe CS3 Master collection. This suite is the bomb. It has Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier, Flash, and Acrobat. I have been playing around with these for a couple of hours or so and have found them to be highly addictive.

The first photo I edited in Photoshop is the box the stuff came in. Nothing really new has happened in Photoshop, or it is with the features that I don't use, which appears to be most of them.

I have created some artwork for my thesis highlighting the hypothesis that I am testing - fuel/ feed/ food. The basis of the thesis is that biofuel production is pushing up food prices, along with the current drought in Australia and the Mekong rice basin (An Giang and provincial friends). I used some of the microsoft clipart photos and modified them in Illustrator, as trying to create my own images seemed to difficult at present.

For some reason all the colours changed and labels disappeared

I have also messed around with the flash tutorial yet haven't included that here as I don't know how to put it into the webpage. Lastly, I mucked around with premier and put this together in about 20 minutes. There are tonnes of features yet to be explored yet I feel like I will be making Star Wars transitions in my videos really soon. The quality of the uploaded video is not so hot as I had to reduce the file size from 220 mbs to less than 100 (I got to excited and dropped it to 7mb). Things to improve include video matching soundtrack smoothing between videos. I think it has a lot of potential and definately was fun to play around with and eager to do a few more, once I shoot some more videos.

Driving around Melb to Deep Purple ;)

I really got to get some books as the suite came with only the online help, yet until then it is experiment, experiment, experiment. Oh yeah, I need CAN BAND VIDEO.