About Two River Sailing
Doreen's love of video, photography and sailing began as a young child, spending her summers in the Ocean Beach section of Lavellette, New Jersey. Uh, wait a minute. Not really. The family did have a sailboat but you would be more likely to see her dad and brother on it. And as for photography and home movies, an instamatic was about it. As far as she was concerned, riding the waves, playing miniature golf and going to the boardwalk at Seaside were her favorite things to do.
And what's with this writing in the third person? Like an author or reporter came and interviewed me and wrote this? It always makes me chuckle when I see this in a one person website. I call it attempting to make yourself look more 'important'. Well, unless the 'bio' has a by line, you know the person being written about wrote it him or herself.
Anyhow, if anyone is interested, Two River Sailing came about...well, I actually shouldn't go into that. I started doing sailing video a few years ago when my son was competing in the Sears Cup at Monmouth Boat Club. My husband, Gary, and I were doing chase boat and it was a great opportunity for me to get some home video of him sailing. Gary then decided to send a clip of a the boys doing a perfect roll tack to the web supervisor at MBC. The clip was put on the site and...as they say, the rest is history. By the way, the son did make it to the semi finals in Annapolis but placed second to the eventual winner of the cup that year - hey, I'm a proud mom.
Doing video while on the water is no easy task. The boat is bouncing (the smaller the boat, the bouncier it gets) plus what you're trying to video is moving. And if the wind is up and the water gets choppy, you have to hold on to the boat with one hand while using the other to video. Ah, memories of the Winter Lightning Championship in St. Pete. Oh yeah, that's usually when the water starts spraying on the lens. But that's when it's the most exciting, especially if there's a really competitive race going on.
Video and Photography
People who are thinking of getting into computer video editing or are thinking about purchasing a camcorder often ask me about what programs I use for editing, what kind of camcorder, etc. Nowadays we have compact cameras that can take video, phones that can take photos and capture video and all sorts of camcorders - hard drive, DVD, high definition, etc. and the the good old mini dv camcorder that uses a digital video cassette - which, by the way, is the least compacted format, making it one of the best formats for video editing. Yup, just because a technology is newer doesn't always mean it's better for what you personally want to do. As for the DVD cams (just pop in the DVD), sometime the disc fails to finalize when you're done and well, you've got a problem. Some of the new high definition camcorders with memory cards look promising and I'll have to make the plunge eventually. For now, I happy with my 'prosumer' Panasonic GS400 - a classic in the camcorder enthusiasts world. Of course, although it does have a very good optical image stabilizer, it can't compare with the very expensive, large professional camcorders - oh, if only....
As for editing on the computer, it can get complicated, depending upon the format of your video. The format that is used on your camera can be different from your cell phone which can be different from your camcorder. You then have to have an editing software that supports that format. Not every software supports every format and some software supports certain formats better than others. As far as I know, every software supports DV (the good old digital video cassette). And if you record to card or hard drive, remember you have to store that video somewhere on your computer when you want to erase it off your camera or camcorder. Or you can record from your computer to a DVD - another format.
Adobe Premiere Elements has been my favorite editing software for a few years. Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements are the consumer versions of the professional Premiere and Photoshop softwares. Unless, you're planning on doing some complicated, advanced graphics or video editing, they're all you need. As a matter of fact, I have Photoshop but 90% of the time, I use Photoshop Elements because it can do what I want and the interface is much more user friendly.
If you do decide to try some video editing or create slide shows, you can easily put together something using themes or instant shows with one of the many consumer software programs out there. In the begining, everyone goes a little overboard using all the effects included with these programs. Eventually, you learn to use them sparingly. If you want to get into something more advanced - music video, pan and zoom, keyframing effects and titles, it can be extremely time consuming. It can take many hours to put together one of my sailing videos - editing clips, selecting music that goes with the clips (sometimes easy, sometimes hard - music too fast, music too slow, find another song), editing the clips further, adding an intro, titles and then burning a DVD (setting up a menu, etc). Or if it's going to uploaded to the web, converting it to another format (I use Flash) and in my case, creating a web page to place it on. You really have to enjoy doing it and have a ton patience at times. I think because we see so many special effects and animation on TV and in movies, we tend not to realize how difficult and time consuming it is, even with the many expensive software programs that the professionals use.
Video and Photography are great hobbies..... and you're preserving memories in the process. My family are sailboat racers. I'm a cruiser. As a result, these have been perfect hobbies for me and fortunately, one I enjoy. I would like to spend more time photographing but when I'm out on the water during a race, everyone would much rather see video. I love it when one of my kids or one of the kids from the club is out there with me and I can hand them the camera. it's funny how us adults are so much more intimidated with this than kids. They just have fun with it...and a lot of times take some very good photos.
There's so much to learn and so much you can do. It's been great seeing this site grow and seeing how many people come here to either watch themselves or others sailing. It's so great to hear when someone tells me that a grandparent, parent or relative were so happy to actually see someone they love sailing for the first time in a video.
Enjoy,
Doreen
