Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve been working mostly on videos lately.

First we made a promotion one for DS’s guitar orchestra:

The beginning credits were made with Final Cut Pro X (now I”m Jonesing for Motion 5). I had to shrink the titles down to fit in the ‘safe’ area – I couldn’t find anywhere in iMovie to show this so I did a run through on our TV. I wish we had shot more ‘panning’ shots to use. I used a dedicated video camera for the super close-ups (60x zoom!) which allowed me to get those spontaneous expressions. This was shot during the rehearsal and we just captured audio during the actual concert immediately afterwards. My Mac had trouble reading the MTS/AVCHD files so I bought ClipWrap which is AWESOME!

and then I edited this one of our last skiing vacation;

I used what I learned in the last video (tagging! And using the clip trimmer to choose just the right frames). Someday I hope to figure out the precision trimmer. We shot this with Contours … I’m wondering if GoPros might give better quality. But since I’m a Panasonic shooter the HXA100 looks interesting too.

I’m still weighting whether to get Final Cut Pro X or not. My Mac isn’t that new and there isn’t much room on the hard drive — all those AVCHD videos keep filling it up. I did find Izzy videos a nice place for tutorials as well as Larry Jordan. I also bought this ‘Graphically Enhanced Manual‘ on iBooks it was pretty interesting but spent too much time (for me anyway) describing how X was different than FCP7.