In yesterday’s post I mentioned my desire to add video to more of my blog entries. I’ve been reluctant to do so in the past because I always have trouble with video. I run into issues with codecs, or just not having the right software to edit or even display video.

Best Buy had Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) on sale yesterday. I bought it because I’ve heard very good things about that program, specifically that it is much better than Windows Movie Maker (WMM). I’ve dabbled with WMM a few times and found it to be simple, but limited. If PE7 was anything like it, then I’d be happy.

It’s been about two hours now. I’m trying to apply a transition from one scene to the next in our cruise video (from last year). This is the best I can do:

That looks like shit. Why is the current scene spilling into the transition? Why isn’t it showing the next scene instead? I searched online for help, and everything I could find either was specific to Premiere Elements 4 or required me to start a paid subscription.

I fired up Windows Movie Maker and loaded the same two scenes. It took me five seconds to do what I wanted:

So, the free program I already had does this extremely simple thing better than the paid program. Had I just pirated this app, I would have paid $0 and lost nothing but a few hundred megabytes of hard drive space (which I would have gotten right back after I uninstalled this piece of crap).

If any of you can offer some (free) advice on how to do transitions correctly, I would very much appreciate it.

Update: I’ve removed the two videos from YouTube, so they will no longer appear here. I don’t think my issue was really with Premiere, but with the difficulty I had in transitioning from Windows Movie Maker to it.

When Nadia and I are watching TV in the living room or at our computers or are otherwise occupied, the cats congregate on our bed. This guarantees that the bed will always be covered in hair and I will choke every night.

While watching 24: Redemption (I’m pretty happy this show is finally coming back on the air), I caught most of them on the bed again:

Using Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Photo together has made it much easier for me to post on a regular basis. I don’t need to fight with HTML anymore, I don’t need to manually upload or resize images, and I don’t have to manually add the bit of JavaScript needed to display the larger images in a pop-up window.

My next thing to do is to add video to my posts, as I did above. We’ll see if I can continue this trend.

I’m really happy that you are back here in the States from your tour in Iraq. We’ve missed you a great deal here, as have your cats. However, it seems that you want your cats back. That’s going to be a problem.

You see, Leila and Todd are incredible mousers, and they are the best lap cats ever. I understand that they are your cats, but I’ve come to regard them as my own. In the interest of fairness, you can have one of your cats back.

In trade for the cat you don’t choose, you get Luna:

Yeah, she looks crazy in that picture. But don’t worry, she’s not like that all the time. Trust me, it’s a fair trade.