Dad With Teeth

And so we are back

It is nice to be back... Sort of.


The Video Blog Link

It is hard not to want to stay in Paris. After a while it all goes by in a blur. You have to ask yourself, did I really see that or was it only imagined? There have been so many marvelous moments on this journey. It has been written that we travel as a way to expand each moment. Time stands still as you look in wonder at a familiar site that you have only viewed in your mind’s eye. There have been so many special moments. So many familiar monuments that have not disappointed. The Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Versailles, Notre Dame, The Tour Eifel, Sacre-Coeur, even Paris neighborhoods too numerous to even remember. Paris is such a marvelous place that has captured the hearts and minds of millions for a millennia. You can add us to that incredibly long list. For once, a town lived up to the hype and exceeded it. It is such a magical, mysterious, marvelous place. We were blessed to visit. And now it is time to come home. The long awaited journey at last comes to an end. Bittersweet at its conclusion, but forever savored in our mind’s eye.

I have been really surprised by the response to the video blog of the trip. There have been so many positive comments and a bit of a landslide of hits on the site. Thank you for the kind words and support. It was an experiment that I think on the whole works. The process was really not as difficult as I expected. I created the web site before we left for Paris and then only had to populate the server with new files as I created them. Once again we shot little 320x240 QuickTime files on the Nikon still camera. The quality is rather crude, especially the audio and the footage in low light, certainly not what I get out of the HD camera we took. But the advantage of using a strictly file based production path far outweighed having to go through the hassle of capturing video into the computer in real time. All we had to do was move the CompactFlash card over to the PC, import the files into Avid and we were editing. I was able to bang out a finished piece in a little over an hour. Production value was not as important as being timely with the posting. We wanted each dispatch up on the server and ready for viewing on the same day we shot it. Shooting video with a still camera still has other liabilities besides the quality of the resultant footage. It would have been nice to have a tripod for the shots, but that went against the idea of being light and spontaneous. Besides, many of the venues we shot in would not allow a tripod so we were stuck with some insanely shaky footage. Again, I come back to the reason for creating these was to give a sense of the moment, not careful documentation of a location or essay on history. For that watch National Geo or Discovery.

One of the big problems was finding a good internet connection in Paris for moving rather large files. I did not have a connection as I wrote the individual pages and I could not check to see how the files played in the interface. As a consequence, some of the videos ended up odd sized, even though I compressed them in flash using the same settings. It was totally random and now that I am back I plan on taking a few minutes to drill into it and find out why.

If you have any comments or reactions please feel free to contact me directly. There is a link to my mail on the home page of the video blog. Let me know what you think. The feedback is always welcome.

posted by Drew Keller @ Thursday, September 28, 2006