“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Video to family and friends


So I finally finished my Christmas video! What a saga. A month of back and forth with so many roadblocks. There are lots of problems with it, but it's been a learning experience. Basically, I decided that instead of regaling my friends and family with copious travel stories (as there are many!) I would make a video of my photos to send. It is rather amateur and dorky, the sound quality is quite poor because I have a crappy microphone, and I have all sorts of other issues with it, not to mention my own voice sounding hideous!

Next time I will ensure that the picture size is reduced before I add it to the film -- it made for a huge (200MB) file. Because it was over 10 mins (It's 12 mins long and that's with very rapid image changes) YouTube wouldn't take it (although it took about 100 upload attempts to discover this). Then there was the fact that due to music copyrights I had to change some of the songs (but, of course, it doesn't tell you which one, so I changed all before I discovered it was the last one - Murphy's Law). Who knew that Alice Cooper's 'School's Out for Summer' would be so strict when it's so appropriate? I still have my doubts about the Frank Sinatra and Nickleback ones as well, but at least it now plays, which is more than it did before.

So, if you would like to view my slideshow movie, I had to break it into two parts on you tube (and I do find it amusing that many of my friends and family have chosen to watch only the first part -- I have stats to check!).

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLV1rUpspA
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9cwHnjODYM

If you’re on facebook, you’ll also find it here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=374696&id=668335330&saved#/video/video.php?v=419981490330&ref=mf

2 comments:

Rob and Mandy said...

Greetings from Cyprus, Great Blog, super photographs, Good luck with your travels, Regards

http://anewlifeincyprus.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Hi Natalya, Nice blog. I might be moving to Baku and have been trying to find out more information about "expat life" in Baku but there doesn't seem to be much (despite the fact that there are quite a few baku'rs in internations they haven't been particularly talkative. Do you happen to know of any active online forums regarding expats in Baku? Two of my main questions deal with dog ownership and finding a place to live (just an idea of the different areas). I don't have an AOL account and couldn't find your email so i thought i'd leave a comment. hope you dont mind! Cheers -Gaiko Gaikokujinkyofusho@gmail.com