Some Great Video Editing Software

My parents 40th wedding anniversary was last month. While planning the party (ok, my wife did most of the real work) we decided to create a video consisting of old photos, news clips, and other eventful prior activities my parents had been involved in over the years.

Putting it together took a really long time but we thought the end result was pretty good until the night we showed it to everyone at the party and it jumped and bounced all over the place. It was still a hit but it felt very unfinished to me. I ditched the free software that had come with the firewire card and went on the hunt for affordable and usable. After a few weeks of trying just about every package I could find and feeling rather foolish at my lack of skill in all of the available packages I finally stumbled onto a package that really worked and fit the easy to use bill. Suprisingly it doesn't seem to be too well known or publicized so it was basically a fluke that I found it. I was able to recreate the slides, integrate the new footage from the party and generate a great movie in just a couple of days. Now, that is what I consider easy to use and it was only about $140CAN so I was quite pleased since I had been looking at software 5-10 times that.

If you ever need some non-linear editing software for video you can't lose with EditStudio from Pure Motion. It is a great package, you get everything you need in a small download and after registering you get a simple code to fully unlock the features. They have a great forum for support and it can do just about anything you want.

We have started producing monthly family videos that cover off the highlights and events that girls script out, act, and help put together. The first one was finished a few weeks ago and turned out quite well. We even had a bit of green screen effects for some real fun.

atom2rss Generating validated rss content

While browsing on rss stuff I discovered that the quick and dirty hack I did early wasn't generating a feed that was strictly valid. Luckily the very nice to have http://www.feedvalidator.org/provides the ability to test the feed and tells you exactly what is wrong. In my case I was using the dates as they were feed from the atom.xml file itself. I had not bothered to transform that format to the RFC822 format required.

A quick fix and we now have a validated rss feed generator :-). I have updated the zip file with the new source code as well as the library running on the server. Anyone that may have picked it up earlier should download it again (see the link in that post).

www.2rss.com speaks on the new ads

2rss has blogged on the new ads. Turns out they are suffering from success and are moving to a pay model for service. Best of luck, had the announcement come before the ads I may have considered paying the small amount they are now asking for.

A Delphi Solution for the 2rss Issue

Well, I have come up with a solution for myself with regard to the previously mentioned 2rss ad problem. Delphi + Irritated User = Solutions :-).

I spent a bit of time looking at the output produced by the 2rss feed and compared to what was available in the atom feed itself since that is all the www.blogger.com provides. It turns out that it is a really simple transform that is required and a few minutes of coding (in Delphi anyway) combined with an XSLT sheet solves the problem. For my personal use I have put together an ISAPI library to take any atom feed and turn it into the equivalent rss 2.0 feed. It works in the very same manner as that of the www.2rss.com tool but does it without the ads.

NOTE: This is not something that I plan to make available for anyone but myself. I simply don't have the bandwidth to allow arbitrary use.

Rather, I am making the source code for the library available for use under any terms. If you are interested you can pick it up here. If you are interested in using it you need an IIS server, MS XML 3.0, and Delphi 7 (very likely compatible with D5 and D6). If it is of use let me know and if you improve on it I wouldn't mind getting those updates back.

Back to some ad-free rss feeds ;-)

It appears that 2rss has decided to inject Advertising into their free tool!

Well, wasn't I surpised to see that my rss feed indicated it had been updated (hmm, don't remember doing that). Had a peek and well what do you know a couple of advertisements were showing up. A check on the 2rss site didn't say anything about it.

It affects a few of the feeds I happen to enjoy such as Allen, Danny, and Anders as well as my own. Guess it is time to find another way to deal with the atom2rss issue.

If you are going to do something for free then do it for free! Don't use it as a means to build a user dependency and then exploit it through ads or fees. I fully understand and accept the idea of them plugging a few ads in but it is simply unacceptable to do it without any warning, notice, and simply feels wrong.

Borland Delphi 7.1 Service Pack Arrives

The long awaited service pack has finally arrived. It includes a huge pile of fixes (but not everything). This is very likely the last update we will see prior to a combined Delphi 9 with both Win32/.NET support.

Pick it up here (and have your original CD ready)