• Learning Final Cut Express

    June 28, 2010 / No Comments

    Final Cut Express 4I had a little free time this weekend, so I thought I would try to wrap my head around Final Cut Express. Video editing and photo editing are both things I want to learn to do better, but I don’t do it enough to learn. I am hoping to get a bunch of video from Hawaii and hopefully put together some good videos.

    In the past iMovie was just fine for me, but the new version drives me crazy. It’s nice for quick and easy things, but it just feels much more limiting than the older version was. So it was time for me to upgrade to Final Cut Express.

    When I first started playing around with Final Cut Express I was lost, but I found an incredible free tutorial online over at IzzyVideo.com. He has a free beginners guide course, and it was so good it made we want to be a subscriber to get his paid videos, but his prices are a little more then I want to spend on something I don’t do all that often.

    With the help of the tutorial I feel I can use Final Cut Express as proficient has I did the old version of iMovie, but I still have a lot of learning and playing around with to do. I just need to get off my butt and make more videos so I have more to play around with.

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  • Saying Goodbye to a Few Podcasts

    June 26, 2010 / No Comments

    I have been a huge podcast listener since first discovering podcasting in October of 2004.  Those were some exciting times.  While I was never a creator, I enjoyed watching all the shows grow and become very popular.  People were making shows for the fun of it — to be part of a community.  I was tempted to create some kind of show, but I was spending too much time enjoying everybody else to have time to create anything myself.

    Times have really changed.  A lot of podcasts are making money now, and people are doing it full time.  That’s great for the people involved, but sad when business comes before the shows.

    This week three of the podcasts I listen to are no more.  CNET’s Gadgetts, TWiT’s Maxwell’s House, and Geek Brief are all no more.

    I will miss Gadgetts, but I am sure I will still hear from everybody on other CNET podcasts that I listen to.  Cali Lews has had some personal and what sounds like business issues with Mevio, but it looks like she is moving over to Revision3 with a new show called Geek Beat, which looks to be very similar to Geek Brief, so I won’t be missing much there.

    The one guy I am really going to miss is Ray Maxwell.  He is like the grandfather I never had.  He has so many great stories from his life.  I was a little disappointed when TWiT wanted him to focus his show to aviation only.  I enjoyed his many other topics better, but now that I look back, I think they were hoping that having a specific topic would draw advertisers.

    He said he is going to appear on other TWiT shows from time to time, but you know how that goes.  Who really knows how often he will be on.  I am hoping Dr. Kiki has him on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour from time to time.

    While it’s sad to see good shows go, I am sure they will be replaced by equally good shows.  It has been quite amazing watching TWiT grow.  I have listened to damn near every show the network has produced, and almost always have one of my three monitors on the live stream.

    Podcasting has brought me so much education, and entertainment these past six years.  It’s almost total replaced my TV viewing.  I bet I only watch 5 hours of TV a week nowadays, and 2.5 hrs of that is Jeopardy.  Thank you internet, and thank you podcast producers.

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  • Google Fonts

    June 25, 2010 / No Comments

    I have been playing around with Google’s embeddable fonts for the last couple weeks. They give a site a little different look without having to worry about anybody else having the fonts installed. There is a fine line between looking different and being easy to read though. Some of the fonts seemed tough to read, and some were missing some special characters. The font selection is a little limited. I finally decided on Vollkorn, and after a few css tweaks, think it looks good. It seems to be working in all the browsers that I have tried. I even opened up IE for the first time in Windows 7 and was surprised that the fonts even worked in IE. If your browser isn’t supported it should fall back to my previous font, Helvetica.

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