“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” by Haniya and Naomi

Please be forgiving, not that you wouldn’t. This is one of the first videos off of my new camera (Canon PowerShot SX10 IS). In it, Haniya and Naomi are playing a piano duet: “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZL_EiUHUYI

I figured out how to edit the videos off my new camera, which was my first goal this morning. I can’t use Windows Movie Maker because my movie file format (H.264) isn’t supported by that program. According to this chart, H.264 is a superior format. So I had to find a free movie editor. I settled on Avidemux — and really, I had no other choice that I could find. It is the only movie editor that is: free, open-source, loads H.264 format movies, and works with Windows XP.

I looked around on the web for how to use Avidemux, and got lost in movie-editor technical language that I have no idea how to understand. I finally tracked down a simple tutorial, otherwise I would be more than clueless and those movies wouldn’t go anywhere!

In the video above, I didn’t add any frills except a fade-in and fade-out. I’d like to learn more. But for today, my goal was to learn how to share what we record. I figured out how to do basic editing (resizing) and saving in .mp4 format (eventually I want to save my movies back in H.264 format, but I will need to find a free encoder for that… more research). I need to work on the optimum settings so the videos don’t look so fuzzy in YouTube but that will have to wait.