I love Christmas. I love being with family.

But sometimes things get weird...

For example:

Tonight we went to a Christmas party at the place my grandma lives (it's a group home). The entertainment for the night was a 78 year-old, retired salvation army officer, accordion playing lady. She led us in some Christmas carols played to the tune of her accordion. After that, she presented the gospel, told some long story I can't remember, and prayed for us. I felt blessed.

Here is proof:



As you can tell, my sister was having way too much fun.



And here is a little snippet of the glorious accordion (and our wonderful singing).



I can't wait till next years party.

For some reason Final Cut Pro was giving me some weird looking green crap after I rendered dissolves on text....

I was tasked in creating a promo video for our Jr. High Summer Camp 2008 using a full tape (60min) of amateur footage from a miniDV camera to create a 2 min video. I was asked to do fast cuts, and so I did.

In order to try and make the cuts line up with the music I tried something new (for me anyways). I simply brought the song into the timeline, and played it through. As it was playing I would hit the marker shortcut button (the key with the wiggly icon to the left of the "1" key) to certain beats of the song - such as accents, builds, etc - keeping in mind the spacings and rhythms of cuts it would produce. Then as I cut and brought clips in from the source they would "snap" into place, and I could adjust the length of the clip accordingly. This really sped up the process of completing this video.

Here are some screenshots of the markers in action:







This isn't the most flashy video ever made, but I think it works for the intended audience. Also, even with an hour of footage, good shots were hard to come by so there are some shots used twice - which I wouldn't normally do - but it was suggested to me so I went with it.

This is the result.