Video edit crash puzzle

Another early rising on a sunny morning, and out of the house for my dentist's appointment by twenty five past eight. As it's half term, the roads were less crowded than usual so I arrived at the surgery ten minutes early. Mr Benfield the dentist inspected the damage and said that the repair job would be straightforward, and I was booked in for a midday appointment on 13th June. He didn't do a temporary filling, as I assumed he would. Perhaps because he could see that the remainder of the tooth was healthy, with just a portion of the original filling still in place. Ten minutes later I was in the nearby Lidl's superstore buying stocks of nuts and smoked fish at decent prices. Back home for breakfast by half past nine. Quite a good start to Friday for me!

I started to work on next week's Corpus Christi prayer video, and soon had a sense of déjà vu about it. In almost all cases the readings and prayers for a Thursday vary because the calendar date and day vary over a cycle of seven years. Ascension and Corpus Christi are on a Thursday whatever the date. I hunted in my digital archive for a previous video and found that the readings for last year were identical. I had already written a different reflection, and the intercessions were also a little different. I wondered if I could edit together the first half of last year's video and the second half of this year's if I prepared this first, using Microsoft's Clipchamp video editor.

On the surface Clipchamp has all the necessary facilities to make light work of this, but in practice this was not the case. It frequently crashed at each stage of the process. My windows laptop is powerful and fast enough to do the job, and my broadband connection is moderately fast, but the app was simply not good enough.

I tinkered around with this all morning until it was time for a chat with my old friend Roy Thomas, now firmly established in Spain, working from Madrid. He's bought property in Alicante now and can see himself staying in Spain for the foreseeable future. We chatted for more than two hours, then I went for a long walk, enjoying the sunshine, picking up annoying rubbish where I could. Today it was half a dozen crisp packets and just three drinks containers.

Finally after supper I caught up with the bereaved father of a man whose funeral I'm doing on Tuesday. He said that he's not been at home much recently but driving down to the seaside, as home is too full of painful memories just at the moment. Now we've talked I'll be able to prepare the funeral service more fittingly, and spared the worry of tracking him down over the weekend.

I spent the evening tinkering with Clipchamp to see if I could learn what made the app crash frequently, but without bothering to uninstall and re-install it, just in case there was something wrong with the version installed on my laptop. Instead I went my study workstation, as least as powerful as my laptop if not more so. I'd not bothered to install Clipchamp on it before, but once the device had sync'd with the laptop, I was able to load the two video component files, edit them and render them into the final MP4 without a crash. There's a difference in sound quality between the first half and the second, as they were recorded in different rooms but that doesn't matter. The fact is, I've learned that I can re-use old video material if I need to, but it is a fiddle in terms of my weekly daily prayer videos compared to making a slideshow video, the way I have done for the past two years.

Another attempt to get to be earlier tonight, and maybe get a bit more out of a fresher earlier start.

First of the year

Thankfully, a day without rain, a little colder due to a wind from the west, but not as cold. From Poland to Spain average temperatures are being recorded ten degrees higher than we'd expect for early January. Very much a symptom of global warming. After breakfast I walked to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist with five others, and then chat over a cuppa in the church hall afterwards. No veg bag to collect this week, so I went straight home and shared cooking lunch with Clare, as she'd bought me some pork loin steaks to prepare in whatever way I fancied. I stewed them slowly with tomatoes and onions and was pleased with the result.

She returned home with the first three kilos of organic bitter oranges from Seville for this year's first batch of marmalade. Later in the day she cooked and de-pipped them and cooked them until they were jam consistency, eight bitter-sweet jars worth! It'll be my turn next to make the second batch.

John at Pidgeons called about a funeral for the 27th of this month, which I won't be able to do as by then I will be in Fuengirola re-orienting myself for the weeks to come

I went out for a walk afterwards, retracting my steps from two days ago to check if any of the new growth of winter flowers had emerged any further. I found a few scattered snowdrops with buds on slender stems just about to open, also one narcissus in bud but not about to flower. 

Not quite as early as last year judging by a photo I took on the second of January last year, but still a couple of weeks earlier than expected. Lots of fresh grass growth is visible in places, pushing up through the brown layer of dead leaves, and there were a few hazel branches with tiny catkins on them as well.

On the way out of Llandaff Fields at the end of my walk, a man was standing outside Cafe Castan in its sheltered space juggling with coloured plastic balls which lit up - a striking sight. He said that he'd worked as a juggler over the years and now taught juggling and circus skills to children. I tried taking photos of him juggling but wasn't pleased with the result with my Sony Alpha DSLR on auto-setting in poor light, I didn't know how to adjust the shutter and ISO speed manually on the spot, and in the end attempted to take some video clips instead. With these I got this result after editing two clips together with MS Clipchamp. It's the first time I've used this camera's video capability since I bought it six years ago next week.

After supper and the Archers, I couldn't find anything of interest to watch on telly, and spent the rest of the evening just sitting quietly and pondering.

By accident or design?

I slept for nine and a half hours last night and woke up refreshed. All thanks to Kay's osteo work on my legs yesterday. There was an email from Pidgeon's confirming a funeral booking for two week's time, and a message from Frances asking me if I'd take tomorrow morning's Eucharist at St Peter's Fairwater. Clare and I then worked through the music we're singing for next month's Early Music concert and she cooked lunch while I uploaded and edited some photos from the past few days. 

For the first time I also made use of Microsoft's Clipchamp Video Editor for a clip taken yesterday of a golden leaved tree by Blackweir Bridge, to find out how easy it would be to learn. I've made slideshows using a few different apps, but relied on old school Movie Maker for years on odd occasions when I needed to edit video, as this could be used without internet. The revised version had too many features to make it worth re-learning how to use it, so I didn't bother with it, found and installed the Windows 7 version on previous devices instead. I've not needed to tinker with video footage in the past few years, so I'm pleased to find something simple and handy for my limited needs.

It rained most of the morning, but had stopped when I went out for a walk after lunch, and looked as if the sky was clearing. Appearances were deceptive however, as more rain clouds swept in from the west. Ten minutes into my walk, the rain started again and didn't stop for more than a hour. It wasn't very heavy so I kept going and just got wet slowly. 

We had an early supper before a choir rehearsal. I thought it was going to be in St Catherine's and I had to open up the church and put the chairs out. But we got the week wrong, it was in the Rectory instead. The choir WhatsApp message board has a great many messages to read in a busy spell, so it's easy to become overwhelmed with excess detail and

I got to church at six, opened up and put some chairs out in a semi-circle for the choir to use. Clare came a little later, then when nobody turned up at six thirty, she rang a choir member and discovered our joint diary error. Then I had to put away the chairs, lock up and then we walked to the Rectory at Victoria Park, and were half an hour late joining the others.

Kim offered us a lift home in her car, as she lives nearby. We were amazed to discover that she runs a classic Morris Minor, in excellent working condition fifty three years old. Brother in Law Eddy ran the estate car version of this when we were all a lot younger, inherited from their father Francis. As David and Anneke grew up and needed more space, he traded it in for an Astra. It's probably forty years since we last rode in any Morris Minor. It's the sight and sound of a bygone era.

We returned home to news of missiles hitting a rural area 8km inside Poland's border with Ukraine. Russia denies it was theirs although the nearby Ukrainian city of Lviv was among the places hit with a hundred missile strikes on energy infrastructure targets today, as has happened daily this week. 

Missile guidance systems rely on satellite navigation, but any missile can malfunction mechanically. It's also possible this was an Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile colliding with a Russian missile. It seems that both sides use the same basic weapon, adapted for different purposes. Only thorough forensic investigation of airspace surveillance records will reveal the truth of the matter.

If it was a Russian missile, this strike could be a random failure, or be aimed at provoking a reaction, since Poland is a NATO member country. Putin could well be testing NATO's willingness to take action  collectively given that 'an attack on one is an attack on all' is a founding principal of the charter. I don't imagine NATO member government defence ministry staff will get much sleep tonight, with a meeting to review the situation tomorrow.