360

Last night, with the camera rolling, I landed a frontside-360, on my first attempt. It is not pretty, but it’s a 360. The background is: For as good as I am at snowboarding, I’ve never been able to do a 360, which really is a must-have in anyone’s bag of tricks.

That was the very first 360 I’ve ever landed, and on the first attempt at same in at least a year. The second one was prettier, but the landing wasn’t quite as smooth.

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I am getting much more comfortable with Microsoft MovieMaker, although I suspect there are probably freeware programs that do a better job. It’s basic enough, and idiot-proof, which is nice. My complaints are with the manipulability of the video effects and transitions, e.g., you can’t change the length or speed of a “fade out, to black.” Or, if you could, it wasn’t intuitive. Also, you can’t apply effects to segments of a clip, and it seemed like when I applied “slow down, half speed” to one clip, there was a mysterious spillover of that effect on the audio (but not the video) component of the next consecutive clip. I don’t think I can resolve this issue without splicing a gap between segments. Maybe I’ll give that a try. Adding titles, subtitles, credits, etc., was fairly straightforward, but I was disappointed with the available formatting options. In any event, the inclusion of titles, transitions, and credits makes for a more professional looking video.

I’m also learning that it takes a tremendous amount of footage to put together even something like the one-minute short that I’ve got here. It turned out well enough, but obviously even within that one minute, there is very little actual content. Most of the video is of me, approaching the jump. I anticipate a lot (and I mean, a lot) of footage in Jackson Hole. I’d like to be able to throw together a few short highlight reels (like this) and a 5- or 6-minute video of each of us.