Storms and Videos

Tropical Storm Alberto headed way north of us. It didn't even threaten to become a hurricane until it was past our location. Then it calmed down rather than increased. We still got some nasty weather here today. And, it felt kinda 'hurricane-ish' because it poured rain and whipped wind for about 20 minutes. Then it was calm and dry for an hour or so. Then another 'band' of stormy weather. hmmmm ... makes me think about our plans. We *don't* want to be here in a hurricane. But, when do you make the decision to drive away? Sometimes it looks like a hurricane is heading here, only to turn further north. We know several stories of people who evacuated Fort Lauderdale, only to run into the hurricane further up the state. Florida is a long state. If they had stayed here, all would have been fine. And, if we leave in time to get all the way out of the state at the first warning of a hurricane - that's just way too much advance planning for me! Besides, we have more plans with family and friends. And, a lot more video editing to do with Mom. We'd like to stick around till late July. Mom and I are truly making progress in the video editing arena. She got the new version of Premiere Elements ... 2.0. She's captured 6 hours of video from her Bhutan trip and we've been working on learning the procedures to decide which clips to keep and how to organize and modify them to get a pleasing end product. You wouldn't believe how time-consuming this is. At the end of her Bhutan tapes, we discovered some video that she took of hurricane Wilma. We used Premiere Elements to put video into a movie and burn it to a DVD. That was actually pretty easy. Then, I spent all day today editing it down to a 2 minute video and figuring out the methods and procedures for compressing the video with Flash 8(the new version that I just bought) into something that you can view on the web. I think I got it. It's still an 8 megabyte file, but it 'progressively downloads'. Check it out by clicking on the image below.