Fun with Electronic Devices!

I am having fun with electronics! As you know if you have been reading this blog, there is a national conference next week in Miami called "Rail-Volution" and it deals with creating more mass transit opportunities and encouraging unique development opportunities around them. They named me "Tour Coordinator" which I consider an honor. These are professionals from around the country (world?) that are focused on converting the way we get around to more environmentally sensitive methods - that is finding ways of getting people out of their single passenger fossil fuel burning automobile and into other environmentally sensitive means of transportation.

What is going to happen is that a group is coming up to Lake Worth on a bus next Wednesday morning. I volunteered to give an overall orientation and introduction to Lake Worth to the people who signed up for the day trip as part of the conference. We are going to spend the day looking at and dissecting the area around the Tri-Rail station. This is all consistent with what the City has done in its master plan to encourage transit related development around the station. This will include the area around the Community College to the west too.

Anyway, I've started working on my presentation. Initially I thought of doing a Powerpoint on the bus and narrate it while in motion. I've decided against that now - too many moving parts. What I have done is download some video editing software and I plan to either do a powerpoint that I can pre-record with a voice over courtesy of the new software or create a video through the same program. Whatever size of file will be too large to post here, but let me know if you'd like a final copy.

As part of the learning curve, I have already realized that my camcorder is not up to the task. That piece of electronics was purchased about 2 1/2 years ago. Figured out that I needed some software and immediately assumed (you know what happens when you assume - if you don't, e-mail me and I will tell you!) that I could get the software that came with the camcorder (which has long since disappeared) from the JVC website, the manufacturer of the camcorder. Well, no such luck. My call to customer service (those wonderful 800 numbers) eventually told me that the software had long since been discontinued and was not available on line. Planned obsolescence for sure. Then, a light bulb went off and I remembered that I wa susing another laptop at the time and it did have the software installed. Eureka! It worked. But only after spending about two hours yesterday getting video and then realized, after buying two cords from Radio Shack (total $60) that it only could send images to the computer that were about the size of a postage stamp. Not good to see on a bus with screens equally as small. Back to the drawing board.

So, I went out again today and used my digital camera's video function to see how that would work. Got back, downloaded the miscellaneous video pieces on my laptop and found out they were all .mov files that my new editing program doesn't recognize. Then I did a Google search for "convert mov to avi" (avi is what the program recognizes) and downloaded a freeware program to convert that. No problem. Files converted.

I experimented with a small video with titles and transitions that I am currently uploading to my blog while I am writing this. The whole "embedding" thing didn't work too well (not at all). So I am trying this. Still have yet to have success. The Blogger limit is 100 mb and the upload is 90 mb. Now it keeps re-setting for some reason.

And after a long wait, it is up and you can witness its tremendous content - hardly. But that's life on the learning curve.

Update: After getting up this morning, I found an error message saying that the upload was not successful. More attempts will be made today. The Blogger people are working on the problem. This is now officially a personal quest!