No, I take that back; my parents provided me with a reel-to-real tape recorder when I was much younger. I loved running around recording people and sounds. I sat by the television during the landing on the moon in 1969 with it.
In seventh grade however, I spliced together a number of three-minute film reels and then recorded a cassette audio track with voice and music. It was the whole summer of various times we went camping in the NH White Mountains. About 22 years after making Waterville Valley 72, I tried to run it in front of an old camcorder and made an unbelievably blurry copy which may still be around here somewhere on a VHS tape. Later in the late 80's, I put camcorder video together with radio. That was when Joel Thomas first bought a camcorder. I even used a Sony tape editing machine when I worked at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai.
It doesn't matter. Technology has finally caught up and surpassed me. In fact, I'm in the dust and it's all because of computers. The combination of a digital camcorder and Pinnacle Studio 9 is a dream. I've only scratched the surface but just burned an eight-minute DVD. Last night, we got a few clips of fireworks over the Fraser from the balcony. And today, I just walked down Columbia Street and to the New Westminster Quay. It was sunny and is Fraser Festival weekend so lots of people were out.
Today's DVD work has titles, and synthetic-muzak tracks were a breeze to drop in. The video is automatically cut into segments when being captured. I just needed to drop the chosen ones on a storyboard. It's simplicity is deceiving as I can imagine spending hours 'tweaking' a scene that nobody, except me, would notice!
I'm both amazed and amazing!