Phew, just made it. Here is my preview of the Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer event in Dublin tonight. The sound quality is not the best, but it is OK on headphones. Enjoy.
Video
More Masquerade Video
This time we have one of my den – the very talented Vandy Vandervort, costumed as The Great Garuda. Vandy won special recognition in the workmanship awards (Master division) for the papier-mache headpiece.
Velociraptors!
Here is some more video from the Denvention 3 masquerade. It features the velociraptor costumes that won Best in Show for Workmanship (despite being a journeyman entry). Huge congratulations to Charles Orndorff, Jennifer Strand, Michael Bruno and Tauni Orndorff for a fabulous entry.
John Picacio Art Tour
During the artists’ reception at Worldcon, John Picacio gave me a personal tour around his exhibit. I filmed it, and now it is on YouTube. The picture quality isn’t great, and clearly I have a lot to learn about shooting video, but hopefully it will be interesting.
More Video
Not mine this time. Via Frank Wu I’ve found this nice compilation of material from the con, including many snippets of masquerade entries.
We Have Video
The trouble with YouTube is that in order to make the video downloadable in a reasonable period it has to sacrifice a lot in quality. This is not good if you are trying to film beautiful costumes. But hopefully having the costumers talk about what they have done makes up for that. Here are Sandy & Pierre (alias Oberon and Titania).
Video Progress
Given that Simon Bisson was so confident that my video files would be recoverable, I decided to try one or two more file recovery utilities. The one that worked was File Recover from PC Tools. It cost me $30, but it was well worth it as I have so far managed to recover almost all of the missing files, including the Picacio interview and the piece about Stephen Clark’s bear costume. I’m still missing one sequence with the velociraptors and the interview with Sandy and Pierre Pettinger, but if that’s all I have lost I’ll be much relieved.
Gone
So this evening I thought I would make a start on editing the video from Worldcon, and the first thing I needed to do was up upload the video from the Hugo ceremony from the Flip camera to the computer. So I did a bit of housekeeping, and then transferred the files. I started up the video editing software and looked for something to edit.
All of the previous Worldcon videos that I had saved were gone. The Hugo ceremony stuff was there OK, but the videos from the masquerade, and the video of John Picacio’s art exhibition, were all gone.
I looked in the recycle bin. Nothing. I got out the file undelete software. Nothing. The videos had been completely wiped.
I know what I did. The video transfer software has a folder that it uses on the computer. The missing video files had been stored there. When I tidied things up I moved the files to subdirectories within that folder. And when I loaded the transfer software it found directories that it didn’t recognize and deleted them.
Well, didn’t just delete them, it wiped them beyond all hope of recovery. (I suspect they were overwritten by the newly uploaded files.)
What kind of pea-brained moron writes software that does this I cannot say. However, once bitten, twice shy. I shall not make that mistake again. From now on every time I upload videos from the camera I will immediately back them up to some other location on the hard drive. If you happen to have a Flip camera, I advise you to do the same thing too.
Ah well, at least that’s less video that I have to process. But damn, that was really good footage that I lost.
Making Movies
We had a bit of time before Kevin had to rush off on his journey to Denver, so we did a quick test on the new video camera. I have uploaded the results to YouTube, and you can view them below. (Warning: the subject matter is of interest only the train geeks).
The quality isn’t great, but that’s not the camera’s fault. I have a much higher quality version on my PC, but you have to sacrifice a lot to get something small enough to put on YouTube. Still, the camera seems to work OK, and I am now reasonably confident that I’ll be able to produce some decent video at Worldcon. Just don’t ask what happened to Part I – I’m still learning to use this thing.
Oh, and just look at that lovely California sunshine. I am so glad to be home.