Sandboarding. Swakopmund. Sony Vegas

For years, I’ve been editing with versions of Adobe Premiere and Premiere Elements, and the one complaint I’ve always had is its tendency to lock up on most computers.  The exception has been my old desktop running XP with 512 MB memory – but even there, I’ve got to restart the computer after I finish editing and before I begin rendering.  And the rendering takes HOURS.

So the guy who makes the customer videos at the sandboarding vendor in Swakopmund, Namibia suggested Sony Vegas (I bought Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum Production Suite for $124.95).  And although I hate having to relearn new software, the tutorial videos they provided got me through the worst of it.  The render time is much, much faster.  It does take some time to start up – mainly to re-import any videos that may be included in a working project file.  But once I got it running, it remained relatively stable.  Not 100%, but relatively.  The only issue is it took 5 tries with different settings before I could get a working video file.  I got several that either wouldn’t open, played black video with no sound, or just sound, but if you’re like me and running editing software on a computer that cost you less than $750, this provided excellent results and includes lots of features.  In theory you can produce video at 1920 HD resolution (but in my case it was black) or for blu-ray (which I didn’t test) but in this case I made a 5-minute video clip at 720 x 480, which did come to a surprisingly high 1.19 GB overall.  It took about 45 minutes to render.

My first project was created from footage of sandboarding.  That’s where you hike up a sand dune wearing snowboarding boots and carrying a snowboard, and then ride it down like it’s snow.  Pretty fun by the way, and good exercise.  Check it out.

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