Sunday, December 17, 2006 - Sun, 17 Dec 2006

Last week, I was fixing some internal bugs that I must have added since the last release. They were tougher to track down and fix them than I thought, but that’s done. One was that Behold would load much slower when Behold was already open in another window (I allow multiple copies of Behold to run at once.) Adding an Application.ProcessMessages command at the right spot fixed that. The second was that some hyperlinks sometimes wouldn’t change back properly after the mouse moved off it. There was one case I needed to add to my Richview modifications to fix that.

This weekend, I wanted to start editing some of my old VHS tapes to pick and choose scenes and produce DVDs. The tapes I want to convert are some that my uncle took over 50 years ago which he took on the old Super 8 format. He converted them to VHS and sent them to me as a present, one which I cherish because it has moving pictures (no sound) of my grandparents and great uncles and aunts who are all gone now. With my parents growing older, it’s very important to get them to help document the people and places and events before all is forgotten.

I’ve been looking at software for video editing for some time and been reading comparisons between them. I want something without too great a learning curve, that’s simple and easy to use. My research led me to Cyberlink’s Power Director. It had an excellent review at Top Ten Reviews and at $75 seems like a good deal. I downloaded a 30-day trial version and played with it this weekend. Like any sophisticated software, it takes some getting used to, but I liked what it did and how it did it. Searching the web for good and bad comments, generally the reviewers downrated it because it didn’t have some of the more powerful editing features. Many tended to prefer Adobe Premiere Elements. But for me, PowerDirector seems to work a bit better. My goal isn’t to become a video editor. I just want to get something out quickly and simply. User comments of PowerDirector were generally very good. Also there was one critical feature I needed, and that was image stabilization to get rid of the shakes in the videos. It is included in PowerDirector, but comes only as a 3rd party plugin with Adobe Premiere at a cost of $100.

So that was an interesting side-venture. But now back to Behold.