Last week we had a work team building event, launching home made rockets. There was lots of potential for photos, but I also tried to take some video with my still digital camera. The quality isn’t that bad, the main problem is keeping it held steady, while laughing. It’s the first time I’ve ever ended up with lots of digital video footage and it proved to be a lot more hassle to deal with than still images are.

Normally, I import everything in to Picasa, scroll through the images and add a star to the ones I like. I then export the stared images and upload to Flickr. It’s not that simple with video, so I tried to edit all the clips into a three minute highlights film. Not having any extra software, I used the Windows Movie Maker application that’s part of Windows XP. It’s basic, but it’s not that bad.

I was trying to mix some still photos with the video with some suitable background music. You just have to drag everything on to a timeline, which is simple enough, but it isn’t very precise and you don’t have a very fine level of control. I was trying to synchronise the images and video so they were in time with the music, but it was very much trial and error. I couldn’t see how to adjust the volume to different levels within the same clip. Each clip had to have one volume level. I guess you’d not expect much more from something that comes as part of the OS. Its certainly not like Acid Pro for audio or Photoshop for images.

I’m not sure if I’ll get in to video editing. It didn’t feel as rewarding as editing music or images and it took much longer. Maybe that’s just because of the software and that it was my first attempt.