After years of doing our Christmas party videos at work in Pinnacle, I switched to Sony Vegas Movie Studio. I had always struggled with crashes and reliability, though I pressed on because Pinnacle’s software was cheap and simple to use. In late 2007, I started gearing up for the video again and read some reviews that trashed on Pinnacle (no surprise there) but pleasantly recommended Sony Vegas. It gets great reviews and while it isn’t as quick to pick up how to use, it’s been fantastic.

I appreciate the extra power and control that Vegas brings. Our camcorder died around the time Jenna was born, so I decided to replace it with a model that shoots in widescreen (I was about six months too early, otherwise I would have been able to go HD). Since everything these days is 16:9, it’s nice to have video in that format natively. Sony Vegas handles blending our old video and new quite nicely.

Having gotten through the Christmas party video in record time with a really tight deadline and little time to spare, I was ready for a break. Now, two months later, I’m ready to get back into video editing. I have about ten DV tapes that I’m getting ripped to the hard drive for processing and editing down into a DVD for our family. I am the first person to realize that few people really care to look at movies of your vacations and kids growing up. However, I’m sure the Grandparents will love it and the kids will have a blast looking at videos of them when they were little. Goodness knows I get a kick out of seeing pictures of me in the early years. Besides, it warms my heart to watch all the old videos of their first steps, eating, etc.

The other big thing I found was video of our remodel project. While I tried to take a lot of pictures, I failed to spread them out much. I got a lot of photos during a couple specific parts of the remodel, but missed large swaths of work. Combined with the video I found, I’ll actually have a decent representation of the project to pull together. I’m really looking forward to pulling it all together!