Please let me know if you are able to come to this event just so that we can look out for you and arrange to sit together. Either email or phone me please. It is not necessary this time to give out menus or ask for choices as I understand that they can cater for large numbers easily.
Tony assures me that they serve very good meals there so I am looking forward to the evening.
The venue at the Bowling Green is very easy to find. It is situated close to a roundabout on the A133 just west of Weeley. (Tel: 01255 831430 Post code : CO16 9AG) If approaching from Colchester along the A120 turn onto the Clacton road (A133) carry on for two roundabouts and the Bowling Green is at the second one. Close to a Q8 filling station and a Travel Inn.
Gareth and Peter gave demonstrations of Video editing techniques on both Mac OSx (Gareth) and Windows XP (Peter) to show the capabilities available now.
Gareth began by showing video from a race meeting (Donnington) he had attended shot with his on-board camera ( very adventurous!). He used the latest version of iMovie which is part of the iLife Apple-Mac suite of programs. The Mac integrates still photo libraries, video libraries and music libraries together so that they are all at hand and it is easy to drop a still photo into some movie footage, in fact since you can apply a low pan or zoom to the still and make it into a sequence of several seconds it is very hard to pick it out as coming from a separate still. Obviously it has to be relevant material, like Gareth's kit car! This all seemed to work very well even though Gareth kept assuring us that he had never used that version of the software before. He is a very good presenter!
The basic features of movie editing are to have two main modes one using a Timeline presentation where the video frames are shown on one track and the audio is shown on another track. More than one video and and audio track can be handed and viewed simultaneously and they can be separated and regrouped if needed. The other mode is the Storyboard which is the classic way to design a movie, effectively you just show the first frame of each take with whatever type of cut/dissolve links them together. Adding various dissolves and cutaways between takes gives a smooth presentation, but the computer needs to spend a little time rendering these as they are inserted into the movie. Gareth emails some of his movies to friends and so cuts down the file size by decreasing the frame resolution to 240x180 and uses MPEG4 or DivX compression reducing 309MB to 8.4MB. It is easy to add a music and voice commentary to movies as Gareth demonstrated with a quick voice over.
By comparison I apologise that my presentation was a bit woolly in showing features of Movie Edit Pro 2004 on Windows XP. In my defence I have to say that all of the movie software packages are very complex and absolutely stuffed with features and although I have had the software for a while I am still getting used to it.
It is possible to clean sections of movie, remove camera shake, change colours, contrast, distort shots, zoom etc. and all these effects may be trialled and removed again. In editing you are essentially building recipe of effects, inclusions and deletions until the movie is finally rendered and exported onto some particular media. With Movie Edit Pro the Lower video sections take precedence over the higher ones which is a useful feature. You can also switch tracks on or off and similarly mute the audio tracks. It is also useful to be able to stretch both audio and video to fill in gaps.
With the right hardware they can be saved as Video CD, DVD or onto VHS tape. Most digital cameras allow you record back to the camera as DVin. My camera was connected to the computer with a high speed card variously known as Firewire or IEEE 1394 or iLink card and can be used for DVin and DVout.
Peter showed cuts and edits on some footage of aircraft at Inverness airport which was downloaded from the camera and the result saved to DVD.
It is a time consuming process even with a 3.2 GHz P4 ; hour of video could take 2 hrs to render to DVD. Where this particular editing package difficult is in handling a movie project where there are several different file types generated with various backup files and it does become somewhat confusing and it is very easy to try and 'tidy up' only to find you've deleted a vital file. I think video editing is a subject we shall return to again later when I have become more proficient in the software. There wasn't time at this meeting to transfer some analogue video into the editor, but I have done this at home since, using the digital camera as an A/D converter.
We appreciated the views of the members present at the last meeting and in agreeing to the Committee plan to purchase a projector in the near future. Unfortunately, as was reported the meeting, the model of projector which was mentioned in the last Newsletter is now out of stock and is discontinued. The Committee have agreed to look a bit further for another suitable model.
I have had a look on ebay for video projectors and the Sanyo PCL-SW30 is still available but is listed at nearly £100 more expensive. There are several other makes listed around the £500 - £600 mark which we could consider. Your editor has finally had to give up using the AntSuite since it won't handle authenticated outgoing SMTP email. So now I've migrated to Netfetch2 which includes Hermes and Newshound. After one or two set up problems everything now works well and I also managed to fix a browser connection problem which had been bugging me for years. I was not able to log onto the ISP server to browse unless I set up the Antsuite first; because it couldn't find the host. When I installed Netfetch2 the same thing happened and I had again to run the AntSuite! Fortunately I got a more meaningful error message and was able to add the ADSL gateway IP address for my router into the Network setup screen in !Boot and it all now works.
By the way I also noticed another problem with Uniprint. If you are using DHCP the IP address of the PC on which the printer is attached may change each time the network comes up and in this case Uniprint can't find it. In this case it is necessary to reset the IP address in the Uniprint setup again.
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| 3rd August | Club Dinner at the "Bowling Green" pub in Weeley | For details see above. |
| September | (Wireless) Networking | Club |
| October | Virtual Acorn hands on | |
| November | Outside speaker TBA | TBA |
| December | Gadgets, DVD burning etc. | Club |
| January | Social evening TBA | |
| February | Unix, Solaris and Java | Club |
| March | JPEG slideshow 10mins per person | Club |
| April | AGM |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are available. the more distant dates are more provisional in definition! Some more meetings may have an outside speaker.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8NP , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events their next meeting will be:
30th July Barbecue ( Just for info, as it is too late to go if you haven't already arranged to go.)
No meeting in August, see the website below for future meeting details.
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL has changed to
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk