Baby Annabelle is Adorable!!

Food and Fun

I love food. I love fun. Thursday-Today was all that and more. Four solid days of Thanksgiving with over 60 family members brought warmth to my heart as the contagious smiling of my baby brought joy to all involved.

Food can really make a difference (as can sleep). Over the past two weeks, I've enjoyed a steak, prosciutto wrapped mozerella, chocolate cake, home-made macaroons, assorted cookies, 2 pies and a cheese-cake. Oh, that was all at work. The feasts at home were far more grand.

It looks like my band is getting together for a show around New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to playing with everyone again. The Kitchen Sinks have a powerful chemistry. The opposite of the black, stinky kind. That's Joe's kitchen sink...

I'm still riding my bike. The black ice made it a bit of fun the other day. Whenever there was a strong wind, me and my bike would drift about in the lane like a leaf. I've removed the toe-clips for the winter, and purchased myself a nice, light (but waterproof) set of boots. They work best when you're not pouring water into them from the top (or riding through 1ft of standing water built up under the RR bridge).

If you read this, leave me a comment with your favorite passionate music band. If you have a song in mind, list that too. Right now, I'm thinking of 'Hysteria' by MUSE.

Baby Video

Be the first to check out the fresh new clip of baby Annabelle on my Facebook. I'm happy with my new camcorder and still on the verge of exploding with excitement about my baby girl!!

New camcorder? Yes indeed!! I purchased the $140 Aiptek A-HD. The mic is terrible, there's no hardware buffer (so pans skew) and colors are oversaturated, but it still exceeds my needs. It's small enough that I can carry it in my pocket (which is where it lives), and it's cheap enough that I don't have to be completely paranoid about where I take it and how I handle it. PERFECT!! Since the video is in 720p, I find myself downsampling the footage I take all the time. It's been hard for me so far to wrap my head around the possibility that I would want to record at a lower resolution than I can because I rarely need the ability to pan and zoom around in my shots... then comes the issues involving the editing and rendering of such ridiculously high quality video... bleah!!!

My standard video workflow at this point is:

1. Copy the video off the SD card to my secondary computer
2. Use SUPER to re-encode the file to an MP4 (from a h.264 AAC-L in a .MOV container) 'cause Sony Vegas 8 doesn't like the A-HD
3. Copy the rendered files to my video processing machine
4. Apply audio filters
1. Audio
1. Compress anything above -5 at 40x (the mic peaks a LOT, it's way too sensative)
2. Increase the gain on 4KHz+ by 4dB
3. Decrease the gain on 500Hz- by 4dB
   
5. Add a soundtrack
6. Burn the resources to DVD

All told, it takes about 15 minutes of manual work and 2-4hrs of automated work per filled memory card. If I just take downsampled video in the first place, I can just copy the card straight to DVD and not worry about converting and such... oh the dilemma this causes!!

Anyhoo, Annabelle is worth it, and the clip I posted today was well worth the price of the camcorder. Life rocks!!!