briantho

[Briantho]

At last - I'm writing. My excuse for not writing before is that I'm retired and have been for several years. Retired, that is, from day-to-day programming and everything related having started all that in 1967. You can't begin to understand how retirement is until you are, retired. Years ago, in the cafeteria, retirees would call in now and then and come up with remarks like "I don't know how I ever had time to work" and we'd think "senile old whatever" but now I, at least, understand.

Grandchildren take time too. I film them 'cause I'm the extended family archivist and I just can't help myself. But mainly, I think, I do amateur theatre productions and it's almost as rewarding. Two camcorders and my Rode Videomic for a couple or more performances and I sit here grinning for weeks.

I started with Pinnacle a few years ago and thought it was fabulous but the crashes wore me down eventually and for the umpteenth time in my life I switched tools and came to Premiere via Ulead's VisualStudio 10. I still use both of them for 5% of what I do.

For programming the main tools I used were RPG and then Assembler, COBOL, FORTRAN, Mark IV, PowerBase, FoxPro, Business Objects, Visual FoxPro and finally ASP with a few indispensable addons in there too.

As for filming I started with Super 8 cine in '76 and moved to VHS in '85. I only started using DV stuff in the last five years or so.

No time for golf or bridge.

[Chuck Engels]

Welcome Brian, and thank you for your involvement in the forum

I have a few more years to go before retirement but I sure can see how busy I am going to be !

Wow, you really ran the gamut of programming tools didn't you

[William Tranter]

Hello Brian. My 'most favourite' country is Switzerland, and my wife and I try to visit every couple of years. Last year we came over with our touring caravan, staying at Solothurn, Sempach (near Luzern), and Bern. We will, hopefully, be coming again next year again with our van and staying on the TCS sites. We haven't yet been to Geneva, although we went on a coach tour a few years ago to visit Chinon castle, then up to Gruyere - what a fantastic place, like a filmset!
Anyway, welcome to retirement-land - now you will have time (ha, ha!) to get out and do some videoing. We take both our camcorders when we go on holidays (both in the UK and Europe), and then I use Premiere Elements to knock them into a watchable video, not that I have any family over here - my sisters and parents are still in Australia. They are all technophobes, don't even know how to programme a VHS video recorder!
Hope you find Muvipix a help - I've been contributing and asking lots of questions on Adobe Premiere Elements forum, and now I've 'graduated' (?) to here.
Anyway, welcome, mate!
Bill

[Briantho]

Bob: Yes, Switzerland is certainly good and for day-to-day living and a bit cheaper than the UK. Not always the case.. I moved here in the dark days of '74 with the intention of staying a year or so but you know how it is. You're right about the 'film set' - there's lots of great backdrops. We like southern France too - it's yet another climate down there. You let us know when you're in the neighbourhood next, OK.

I liked your various intros, quite inspirational. Did I ever hear that music (or something like it) on "The Fast Show", Chumley-Warner and all that?

Chuck: Yes, lots of different tools. In the nineties top managers would wring their hands and go on about change management and my colleagues and I would slowly shake our heads (or hold them in our hands) desperate to get back to the blur of constant change accelerating us forwards. It's a great ride and I'm still just about hanging on. I get the clear impression you're having a lot of fun too. But that's true for all of us round here

[William Tranter]

Brian, the music I use for my intros. is called "Calling All Workers", and is really just the fanfare used in the piece. I wanted something to 'wake up' the viewers of my videos, because most of them are busy talking about this and that while I prepare the DVD or tape deck for playing the video, and many times they didn't notice the video had actually started before they shut up! This inspired me to produce a fanfare intro. which normally runs before the actual video title, and so they see the finished result of my work in Premiere elements.
It seems to have worked, and I have a set of about half a dozen different intros. to keep my audience on their toes - I don't want them dying of boredom!
Yes, when we are coming to Switzerland I'll most certainly give you a call, probably through this webpage, and we could possibly meet up and discuss the problems encountered with our video editing. I always take our laptop when we go on holidays, and it has PE v.2 installed on it, though I don't actually do any editing while we are on holidays - Maisie would murder me! It was difficult enough to get her to accept having a computer in the caravan in the first place, even though she now acknowledges that having it is a Good Thing after all.
All the best,
Bill