We are in the early stages of editing a couple of archive features which will be on Northern Ireland and Germany/Austria the reconstruction is pretty well a theme running through both and shows what war and violence can do but that recovery can happen. Where the material is in BW I'll colourise it, naturally some tones won't reproduce bang on for colour but it does make it a lot more viewable and immediate to today's audiences. I've also been scanning cine including John Bishops coverage o German trolleybus systems. Anyway lacking inspiration for anything else her are some shots from Germany on previous trips. I've now got maps for all Czech tram and trolleybus systems ready for our July 2023 trip there. I has always been a pleasure filming the buses at Preston, it was a bit wet and windy to start so the brolly made an outing. There is always a good mix of buses here, you never know what might appear. Anyway the quickest was to describe the outing is to give you the4 photos, the DVD is already edited. I'll get the 4 outstanding covers ready and the DVDs on the shop over the weekend. I decided to take advantage of the promised light cloud to film the new electric buses at Coventry, we left about 7.30am and were parked up by around 9am. We had an immediate problem, one of Mandy's wheelchair wheels at the front had lost its retaining bolt. It took a bit but I managed a bit of bush engineering with an allen key and duct tape. The factory is near Chasetown so it wouldn't be hugely out of the way to call there on the way home. The light was spot on most of the time, the usual positions, I don't even bother with the bus station these days. There are only Nat Express and Stagecoach serving this city but plenty of them. RGK sorted out the wheelchair and I've edited the Burton on Trent film and will follow with Coventry and get the covers done at the weekend. I'm still downloading material for a couple of projects I've in my mind. I updated my Topaz software editing suite which promised a lot but delivered nothing new, still takes forever to render and there smoothing of jumpy shots makes it look worse than Edius ever did. I'll ask for a refund again , I'll stick with NEAT, Aimersoft etc tried and tested plus Pixbeam doing the colourisation. We got a couple of orders from EBay but with the advertising bill at £600 a month the present level of orders means that we are subsidising the order by at least 50%. It seems sensible at some stage perhaps the end of 2023 to go internet only, it would certainly lose some of the non computer people but they can still fill in an order form and get the DVD updates list. The only alternative is to just do things as my own hobby and load clips to Youtube. I've tried filming in a higher frame rate at 1080 at 50fps but it certainly gets through the memory on the chips so much so that although it says I've used an hour on the counter it could only be 50 minutes, hence a few slightly shorter DVDs. Mind you there are now a lot less buses to film in most locations. Photos from Coventry today. A good day filming at Burton on Trent, most buses still in Classic bus livery with stickers but a few single deckers are full Diamond! Friendly crews as ever, I was a bit worried the promised light cloud wouldn't come over but although an hour late from BBC timings it did the job late morning. Very windy at home less so at Burton and the wretched bridge works which have been ongoing since the 19th century are over and you can drive straight through to the centre and park up easy peasy. Hence Burton is our slide show tonight. Been rooting through my old tapes and transferring some tele cine work I did years ago, the Hi8 tapes have not lasted very well and through up 'dirty' heads all the time. I've also invested in the Topaz software again , last time I got a refund, this was just an update on the version they let me keep gratis, I hope there is something positive to report. So far NEAT has done well but does not increase the frames per second and Aimersoft can increase but only by repeating frames whereas Topaz uses AI to create interim frames. All very technical but it does all give good results. |
PMP Sponsors the North West Vehicle Restoration Trust at Kirkby.
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