Viva Video

Yesterday and today each has been a Big Day.  Why?  One word: Video.  We are finally up and running once again with our video production capabilities.  We are positively giddy about the whole thing.

To understand the giddiness we have to step into the Way Back Time Machine.  We're talking WAAAY Back here, folks, like the mid-1960's.  When I first went to Purdue in the fall of 1965, I learned right away the school offered a couple of classes in video production.  Naturally I enrolled and actually dreamed of a career in the early TV world.  Back in those days, video cameras weighed about as much as Volkswagen.  It took two men and a troop of Boy Scouts to wrassle the cables and move the pedestal-mounted monster camera about the studio.  Of course, the studio was freezing cold because of all the heat generated by those old tube cameras and processing machines.  The air conditioning had to run on high just to keep the electronic from destroying themselves.  I did real well in the TV production classes I took and definitely got bit by the video bug at an early age.

When VHS cameras finally came along in the late 1970's, oh, how dearly I wanted "in" on that game.  I had to wait until the early 1980's to find a way to get the equipment without paying for it.  That's a long story.  I tried to make a living doing videos for a few years.  I failed miserably but at least I gave it a try.

As video technology became smaller and smaller, I continued to take a stab at video production every few years, only to continue to fail.  One day in early 2008, I was walking around downtown Idaho Falls and noticed a new business across from Great Harvest.  Some guy was going to give people lessons in how to use Apple iMacs.  Somehow, I got him to give me the lessons free of charge on behalf of the RSVP.

I finally found success in video production.  The iMovie program on an Apple iMac is easily the finest and most user-friendly piece of video production technology ever invented for low level people like me.

Eventually, he went out of business and we were able to buy one of his iMacs for a great price.  We put the computer in our office and for the next two years I was in Hog Heaven, making little videos left and right mostly about Senior Centers and EICAP Staff and so forth.  We're guessing me made more than a couple dozen such videos.

Well, by and by, as you know, life circumstances changed and we retired from the job and became Snowbirds, etc.  The computer sat in our basement in Idaho Falls.  We took it down to Arizona last year but  it had grown old and balky and we couldn't get it working correctly.  Time passed.

Finally, we were ready to use the iMac for target practice a few weeks ago when Goatherder rose to the occasion and said he would rejuvenate the computer.  He waved some sort of a magic wand over it and sprinkled holy water on it and brought it to Second Chance Ranch yesterday.  By golly, whatever he did made the thing behave like a custom hot rod computer.  We were shocked and overjoyed.  Giddy, in fact.

THANK YOU, GOATHERDER!

We've been messing with it ever since and can't hardly take our hands off of it.  We found all sorts of old 2009 unprocessed video and have already put up three short YouTube videos using the old files.  That's why we are giddy.  Then, by pure chance, we found 18 of our old RSVP videos online!  YEA!!!!!  This is really fun.

We embedded a short video of a piano player here.  She was Virginia Laird and would have been 97 at the time we recorded her in 2008 playing the piano in the Clark County Senior Center in Dubois, Idaho.  Virginia died in 2011.  The Senior Center has faded into history as well and no longer exists in any form.




Here is a link to Virginia's obituary:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/postregister/obituary.aspx?n=virginia-pearl-sanders-laird&pid=147909830#fbLoggedOut

Here is a link to those 18 videos--we will try to find the other ones:

http://www.youtube.com/user/RSVPEICAP?feature=watch

Here's a bunch more on a different account

http://www.youtube.com/user/idahovolunteer?feature=watch

Here's a link to where we put the three we've uploaded so far today.  They are just for archival purposes--not very good but we didn't want to trash the files.

http://theidahoroad.blogspot.com/

LIFE IS GOOD!  Many Cheers, jp