Thursday, February 24, 2011

Paris on video

My modest camera (I had to sell all the good equipment to buy food) has a simple video function, and I've used it twice in the past few days to create extremely short videos of scenes in Paris.

I've been trying to use the trial version of the Corel editing software that I downloaded. It seemed pretty useful, and since I always pay for my software, I tried to register the software and buy it at the special price that the software itself advertised to me each time I closed the program. But alas, Corel has fraudulently pulled a bait-and-switch on me. Instead of directing me to a page where I could buy the software at the advertised price, I was forced to another page with a price that was 160% higher than the advertised “special offer”! I e-mailed a complaint to Corel, but I don't ever expect to get an answer. If the company shafts people like that, it's certainly not going to admit to it in its support organization.

It's a pity, because the software (bought from Ulead—Corel is a specialist in buying, rebranding, and hiking up the price on stuff that someone else wrote) is rather nice, although it crashes when reading some QuickTime files.

Anyway, I did manage to make two videos, one of thirty seconds, and one of two minutes. That might not sound like much, but uploading a two-minute video to YouTube took me six hours, so the thought of uploading anything of significant length is rather scary. But the two videos are out there now, in high definition. Not much to look at, but making better videos would cost money, just like everything else in the world, and money's something I don't have.

One video, at the top of this post, is a very brief look at the Champs that I recorded on the way home. The other is a video of the infamous Rue Cler that I also took on the way home, and it's a staggering two minutes in length … practically a feature-length presentation!

Yes, I know that I'm not particularly gifted for video. It's just for documentary purposes, not art.

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