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Yikes, I spent a lot of money today! For the longest time, most of our free cash has gone into the houses we’ve owned. Consequently, I’ve had to “scrape by” on consumer-grade junk or borrow gear when it came time to shoot any decent video for hire.

So after cashing out our “old house” last week, Dar and I discussed the prospect of infusing some of the gains from that sale into my video production biz. We decided on a budget of $6k for a new camera, tripod, lighting, sound gear, and miscellany. For the first time in my life, now I’m dealing with pro-level gear… and it looks like I’ll have to keep pinching pennies to buy most of the “miscellany”. It’s truly amazing what $6k won’t buy when you run with the big dawgs.

But, let me say this in no uncertain terms: I have the best wife in the world for letting me pursue my passions. Pro gear or not, $6k is still a lot of money for our family.

But thank goodness our real estate ventures required me to push-off my camera purchase long enough that $4,000 will now buy a darn nice hi-def camera for what it cost a year ago to buy a nice Standard-def. camera.  No kidding. And after lurking for months on the DV/HDV forums, I set my sights on the Canon XH-A1 HDV unit. She has 3 CCDs with a resolution of 1440×1080 each, and can shoot in 60i, 30p, or 24p modes (interlaced frames and progressive). For a reference, compare this to 720×480 pixels of standard-def DV and you’re looking at over four times the resolution!

Okay, okay, so the million $ question: shoot all you want in HD, but who can actually watch your HD footage? Right now, not that many folks (but more people are buying HD displays every day). And the delivery medium/ format (HD DVDs, Blu-Ray, or ???) is still problematic. But, to me, it makes no sense today to spend our hard-earned cash on yesterday’s technology. And even if I have to deliver in SD for awhile (or any resolution in between), I can still shoot in HD now.

And imagine having those extra pixels “in post” on an SD project… think, “little frame on a big picture” and how you can do pans and zooms within the larger HD frame, adding “camera moves” to the scene that were never shot that way. Kewl!

OK, on to the next piece I bought today… Oh, but you do want to see another angle of the beautiful cam, don’t you?!

Next up is the Libec LS-38 tripod. It’s Japanese-made, rock solid, with a very fluid head. No frills… just good support. I almost bought the de-facto standard mid-price tripod, the Bogen/Manfrotto 503 head coupled with one of their basic legs. But a few members on a few different forums were encouraged by this stouter, more fluid combo from a company that almost has no following here in the States (yet!). I then found a reviewer from the UK that sings its praises… so I was convinced.

Throw in a tripod controller, a few filters (one to protect that sweet Canon glass 24/7), and some tapes… and I’ve already spent $4,600 of my budget. And I haven’t even touched light and sound!

So there ‘ya go. Irony of ironies: my new video cam costs about four times what my vehicle is worth! Priorities, man, priorities…

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Logan competed in his first Spelling Bee today. Since he’s in the Colorado Virtual Academy, they grouped a bunch of students together and held a regional bee out in Windsor, CO, about 30 minutes north of here.

Logan was very nervous, and was bumped-out in the first round. He was nailed by the word “staple”… and very upset at himself, but quickly bucked-up to watch the rest of the competition.

It only lasted a few rounds, and the winner won on the word “yearning”. I guess she was yearning to win this thing!

Speaking of the Bee, if you haven’t yet seen the amazing film Akeelah and the Bee, so yourself a favor and go rent the DVD. Barring just a few bad words, it’s suitable for age 8 on up to 108, and it’s an amazing story of triumph and humanity. My boys loved it.

Did everyone happen to hear that a massive collective sigh emanate from downtown Longmont at about 5pm today?!

Yes indeed, the Browns are now down to just two mortgages! The Fox Hill house now belongs to Jodi and Lisa (bless them).

Clink! Cheers! And praise the Lord!

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While designers all sit around and wait for the actual CS3 (Creative Suite 3) software from Adobe, some of us anxiously pour over every press release and detail coming out of San Jose. Some a little too anxiously, IMHO.Take the re-design of the latest icons, said to be used on the CS3 release:

Looks a bit like the Periodic Table of the Elements, eh? Maybe a nice bit of homage? Do I really have to add another shameless plug to my Beeriodic Table? Yeah!

Most of the icons got the “periodic” treatment, including the apps I use daily… AE, PPro, PS. I guess now they’re: Ae, Pr, and Ps! Au and En (Audition and Encore) are in there also. It seems like Acrobat and Flash got to keep their traditional logos, though. Maybe because they’re comprised of letters already. And Illustrator is Ai?! Must be because of the name-association with the filename extension. And there’s some other odd pictures in there, as well. Since Adobe just bought one of my favorite video application companies, Serious Magic… maybe some of the funky icons are for slated for those “still to be decided” “Serious/Adobe” applications.

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OK, so at least it’s not a “Valentine’s Letter” like it was in year’s past. But we long since quit calling it a “Christmas Letter” for obvious reasons.

Click on the pic if you want to read about last year for The Browns and see what this year might hold…

Wow! OK… so I spent a few hours looking for an application to convert my videos to Flash. Yeah, yeah, I know that you can encode FLVs straight from PPro and AE… but there’s still that little bit about embedding them in a Webpage, streaming, etc. In the end, it looked like I was going to have to spend about fifty bucks to get a program to take AVIs or FLVs and embed them into usable SWF. Are ‘ya dizzy yet with “alphabet soup”??

But first a little video (my first Flash video!) of the lead-in from my current project for my church’s small group ministry. I just animated some Photoshop layers in AE, added a 3D camera and some lights for the logo. Then it goes into the titles where I just got lazy and used an AE text animation preset.

And now the backstory….

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I finally completed the video I made as a gift for a local WWII veteran. I shot it waaayy back in March ‘05, after meeting “my” veteran at a production I was doing for Dar’s Credit Union (he was one of the founding members). The man, Bill Herring, was in the storied Tenth Mountain Division, seeing combat as a rifleman, helping his Division break through the Wehrmacht’s Gothic Line in Italy, 1945.

Mr. Herring was a delight to interview, his memories still tack-sharp, providing vivid details from exactly 60 years prior to the interview. Along with 70 minutes or so of interview captured during one very long night of shooting, he provided me with several mementos from his scrapbook to photograph or scan to include in the piece… snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings, postcards, even actual shrapnel pieces from German artillery. Regrettably, he never showed me his most-prized possession: a German Luger pistol, although I did scan the requisition papers for it.

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My buddy Greg Thompson took these shots of the kids sledding on 12.26.06 with his fancy new DSLR, a Pentax K10D. The beast shoots 10 megapixel images and accepts all of his 35mm lenses he’s aquired over the years. To give you an idea of what kind of resolution that is, here’s the same image as one those above before down-rezzing…

Pretty cool, huh?!

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This afternoon, our buddy Mark let us borrow his trailer, as he has for the hundred or so other trips we’ve made moving all of our stuff from Old House to New House for the past six months. This time, though, it was full of geese… big decoys he uses during goose season. So we had to offload about 40 decoys before we could use the trailer.

Rather than immediately put them in the garage, Logan thought it’d be fun to put them out in the yard for awhile, so he placed them all around the white mass of snow that’s now our old front yard. It was a pretty cool scene. We even watched a few flocks of the actual birds pass over the south of us, honking away, flying in those long, graceful v-formations… hoping they’d spot our “flock” and land in our yard. No such luck.

Alas, the decoys are now confined to our old garage… until the next time their asked to stand in the snow and wait for their ‘birds of a feather…’.