Movin’ right along

Bich and I spent the weekend packing for our big move to Kirksville. Actually, we’re just moving a few things for now, as our house doesn’t close for another month and a half. But we want everything in boxes so that, come July 15th, we can just pack up the U-Haul and hit the road.

Dakota visited over the Memorial Day weekend, and I installed a brand-new 120 gigabyte hard drive in his computer. Properly armed, he can now begin the task of editing our short subject documentary, “Weekend Warriors.”

I also loaned him my Canon Elura so he can play back my footage. We ran into a minor compatibility problem: His GL1 will not properly play the tapes that my XL1 recorded. The audio comes out garbled and choppy. This sort of thing happens from time to time, even within cameras of the same brand. If you record on LP mode, you will run across this problem A LOT. Actually, you can pretty well bet that any MiniDV tape you’ve recorded in LP mode will not properly play in any other camera but your own. That’s why it’s a good idea to always record in SP. It works fine on the Elura, though.

We found this out the hard way. Several years ago, Dakota and I spent an entire day shooting a promo video for a retreat run by the Lutheran church in Missouri. Unfortunately, we shot it in LP, before we knew better. By the time we came back to the footage, with different equipment, we realized that all our tapes are useless.

Unless someone out there has a Canon Ultura they’d like to loan us for a day? Anyone?