Back in Milwaukee...now for some video!

After spending a couple of months in the Carolinas, we've returned to the great state of Wisconsin and have gotten right to work.

Heretofore, we have focused mainly on the interviews: identifying appropriate candiadates, gathering the necessary equipment, going on location.

We've now performed about 20 interviews and the video is burning a hole in our website. We're anxious to get excerpts and full videos done.

Some of the videos almost edit themselves. Perhaps, they're concise or we just remember them well enough that we can go right to the juicy stuff. In some cases, we bonded to the people to whom we were talking. We may have become friendly with them or we may just have enjoyed the interview ourselves. In any case, editing them can seem almost easy.

Other videos will require some intense study and, in some cases, we may need to watch the entire videos again: reliving our time at the shoot. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is time consuming and it slows us down.

We're using Final Cut Pro for the editing although we have Sony Vegas as a back up...just in case. We have plenty of hard disk space, but even a Terabyte fills up fast when you're dumping hours and hours of video on it. We're evaluating upgrading our disk drives, but haven't made that decision just yet.

We have two Mac systems on which we can edit. Brooke does the vast majority of the editing; she's a pro! I've been going through some Final Cut tutorials and may take a whack at some of the interviews...it'll be good for me to get this ability so we both can crank out the videos.

The website is being updated daily but we're still searching for a good look and feel. We're using a content management software system called Joomla. It's pretty easy to add pages and change the look and feel of the entire system but this may turn out to be phase one of the site. Phase two may just require a professional designer to be involved.

It's exciting to be home but it was equally sad to leave Asheville. We really fell in love with the city and have already spoken about making a return visit either in the Summer or next Winter (or both!)