Well I made the changes to Outlook to try and get the Contact addresses usable in email that I previously mentioned.

And did it worked? Did it hell. Amended the default address book to Contacts which was set to being an address book and no joy. No doubt if I ran System File Check, a couple of registry cleaners, defragmented the drive, made a nice cup of tea and rebooted three times a registry setting would mysteriously be amended and the next time Outlook is run the address book would be full of the Contacts addresses. Back to the drawing board.

Done most of the edits I need to do on the video using Sony Vegas and have even managed to find out how to do slow motion. Rediculously obvious after the event. Where some camera work has gone awry but we have some great sound then I’ m going to try and delete the video and keep the audio and replace the video with some stills.

Used DVD Architect for writing the DVD’s and that worked well too. How it works is that you use Vegas for editing the film and adding additional sound etc and then use that application to render an .avi file. This file you then fling through DVD Architect and that application writes the DVD. Architect also gives you lots of additional functionality that you can add to the .avi file prior to authoring. Haven’t checked any of that yet.

Tried to setup the PS3 to connect to the wireless network again and this time it couldn’t see our network only one of the neighbours. Also the selection screen the PS3 displays is no longer mauve but black.

Learning Sony Vegas has been quite fun. I started with a bittorrent version, the latest version 7, but as I was so impressed by it (And that you had no manuals. Ed) I bought Vegas Movie Studio v6.

You get ‘Getting you started’ manuals and some great tutorials. I had some issues including the several ways of getting video files into a Vegas project. I tried and had some success with mpeg2 files then read that Vegas isn’t so hot at editing them. I never noticed any problem. I also directly loaded VOB files which worked OK as well. But the best way to load video files was to let Vegas read them from the mini-DVD. This gave you a separate file for each recording session so it was a quick start for the creation of chapters.

Learning how to get some video to run in slow motion was a pain and was finally rectified when I found out the Velocity Envelopes don’t work in Studio v6. I did Google for whether slow motion can be accomplished in v6 and confusingly found answers pointing both ways. So I scrubbed the slow motion section and replaced it with an extended display of a photo.  The insertion of still pictures worked well as does the adding of music, titling and cross fades.

I started the edit in anger a couple of days ago and made some progress and continued for a while again yesterday and just to prove what a novice I am at this I mucked it up (What again? Ed).

With all of my IT experience I didn’t keep a backup of the previous days editing but just continued editing the same file with the odd save every time I thought I had done a good edit. Of course one time I hadn’t done a good edit but it had been saved. I’d deleted some video but not its audio. Thought I’d sorted the problem later by deleting the ’spare’ audio. Well it looked like I had but I noticed later there were audio cross fades in several places. When I played them back it was a mess with the relevant audio fading in whilst some unwanted audio was being faded out.

The answer is to delete the video and audio at the same time. And the other answer is to edit each days work with the date appended to the file name, so if I have a bad days edit I can go back to a good days edit.