Another Quick Tip - Experimenting with new tools and techniques

This is a simple recycling tip, to help keep your brushes happy. Stay watching for the Extra Bonus Tip about cleaning watercolour brushes at the end.

Still experimenting with new techniques and tools to create these videos. I just updated my very old version of VideoStudio, to the last every (2023) version. Despite the "end of the road" vibes. It does what I need. Faster rendering and higher resolution. Not to mention several new features to learn. This video for YouTube was filmed on my phone and edited with Corel VideoStudio.

So I still have a lot to learn about filming, presenting and more professional editing, BUT I am learning and enjoying myself. Maybe these tips might help or interest you.

Ive spent more time than expected making a YouTube video. I suppose I learned a lot but I still have a lot to learn.

I did find something really neat. I was able to record mt phone sequence using zoom. I set up a private meeting logged in from my phone and shared the screen and pressed record meeting locally back on the host PC.  No exotic hardware or software required.

Sketching .vs. Photography

Here are a couple of YouTube videos by Kenly Dillard giving a demonstration of sketching and its similarities to still photography. Whilst he is demonstrating sketching the context about seeing the light and creating a picture, his video and examples are well worth watching, even though they do jump around a bit (Unfortunately the talk is incomplete, some bits are missing)

Another One Bites the Dust

I like the queen song but not when it applies to my external hard drives. My third Western Digital drive in a row has failed. Apple’s ITunes is definitely not to blame this time. Although there was some audio and video clips on the drive when it failed. It died in a very similar fashion to the other Western Digital drives, it got slower and slower, and slower but this time it failed completely before I could find space and retrieve its contents. Reports of this painful slowness of Western Digital drives seems to be very common among the various user forums on the net and even the Western Digital's own user support (where it remains unanswered!).

A Hard Lesson

I was not using the drive for any specific archives, so lost files can in theory be recovered. I was using the drive as a large scratch working area and convenient transfer place between computers, so many files passed through it.Specifically I held a lot of videos in various stages of editing and review on this scratch drive. I was mirroring this to my Netgear Stora (NAS style network disks) and had assumed that this would ensure a decent backup of the drive. I had not realised what might happen to the “mirror” as the disk began to slowly die. It seems that the mirroring was timing out while looking at files and must have assumed that the files had been deleted, so they where also deleted from my mirror. Some older directories were ok but anything I had recently worked on, just had the skeleton of empty folders on the “mirror” backup. In other words it was a copy of the apparently almost dead disk, not my actual files on the disk. So there is a hard lesson here, “mirror” disks are a convenient form of automated backup but they should not be relied on.

Selective Colour through masking in Photoshop

I actually don’t have photoshop (I do have Photoshop Elements, which i don’t use much) but I though I needed to include reference to using photoshop and layers to achieve a similar colourization to the post yesterday. The basics are very similar, desaturate the image and in this case using masking bring back the selected areas of colour you want.

There are dozen of YouTube videos describing this process but this one is simple and easy to follow. So like yesterday it is time for you to have fun, follow the proces in the video to start but experiment and be creative.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and I had just dropped a grape into my iced soda, when It became "alive" and dances in the moment. I was so fascinating to watch I grabbed my new little Canon EOS 1100D, which takes HD movies by the way. My main difficulty is the movies it takes are in .MOV format and not having an Apple Mac I find the movies a little hard to view (the free Quicktime, which is always very slow to load and seems to  leave the movie clips very jerky, Lightroom and Picasa are worse). However I have discovered, by accident, that the Windows Live Movie Maker does a good job, but you need to wait while it "prepares" the video (I assume this is some sort of necessary CODEC conversion). Saving the movie (in .WMV format) lets me use Picasa, my DVD creator and even upload to You Tube.

I'm not suggesting I am a fan of one format over another, its just that .MOV format can be a bit of a hassle if you have a modern PC.

PhotoProject :: SkyScape (video)

If you got a new camera for Christmas and have already amassed a lot of photos, plenty  of them great! Why not make them into a slide show movie. Often the software that came with you camera includes a “make movie” option, if not Picasa has a neat movie option, albeit without to much individual slide control. If you want a little more creative control The free t download Windows Live Essentials movie maker is worth a look, but I still think Microsoft’s Photo Story 3 for XP is the best slideshow maker around for free.

I made this very simple movie out of 10 hand held images of a stormy sky last night, I just wanted to see if there was anything new in Picasa 3.9 in terms of movie making (there isn’t that I could see). On the plus side picasa movie is very easy to use and takes very little time to create something interesting. It also takes care of the upload to you tube

Darwin In Australia according to Robin Williams

Last night our PM waffled on about offence at Robin William’s comment that Australians are basically English Red Necks, and failed in an attempt at humour himself suggesting Robin should visit Alabama. All Americans know all to well about red necks, no visit to Alabama is required. What probably annoyed our PM was a reference later in the interview, I’ll let you find that yourself. In the context of the interview with David Letterman Robin’'s comments were actually funny (see full interview You Tube video below) although so many of the notations are just wrong (flying snakes, scrums in aussie rules etc). The more interesting part is Robin’s take on Australian Animals and Darwin (it starts at the 4:10 minute mark)

Well Charles Darwin did actually visit Australia. If only Robin knew that it was on the exact same day he helped shoot a platypus and watched a conical sand trap created by an ant on a sunny river bank. He noted these strange animals were so different to English fauna yet they behaved and filled a familiar ecological niche.  He wrote in his notebook -

"Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same, and certainly the end in each case is complete."

Several scholars believe this is the first time he commits to paper his growing beliefs that are moving away from belief in a single creator (strict biblical interpretation) and the Immutability of species (the jargon of the day for all species where created at the same time and are permanently the same).

I know all this because I have been researching and have retraced Darwin trip from Sydney Bathurst in 1836. I am having an exhibition of photographs and painting at the Gecko Gallery in Fish Creek from April 18th to 15th May, inspired by what Darwin saw.