Time travelling

I've been working on finishing the 'Fred' DVD but circumstances have conspired for that not to happen just yet. Firstly the PC I use to edit on is rather long in the tooth and I have also run out of storage for new video footage. I'm not an expert on the technicalities of computers but I know that I have three external drives of 1 terra byte each and they are now full tot he brim. All is not lost as the new all singing and dancing mega PC is on order and should be with me in the next week or so. It should allow me to work faster and easier... famous last words.

Secondly, I was supposed to go out and shoot some last shots of things Fred mentions to add into the film but the weather was awful, there was no loco available and my driver went sick... I went home and lit a fire to sulk beside.

Anyhow, that was yesterday. Today I took the camera for a ride on the FR and experimented with the time lapse facility. You can see the results of this here:

It shot half a second every 30 seconds. I'll try another trip on another day with a different rate, it makes for a very quick but slightly odd video.

Fred and the Princess

I've been a busy bunny this week of my time knocking the'Fred' DVD into anearly final shape. I've got all the archive pictures I need as Fred found some slides with a couple of faces which he mentions, Norman Bond scanned them for me at double quick speed and they help tell the story. Also I've been making sure that the audio levels are as even and audible as possible, there are a couple of shots which have quite a bit of wind blasting noise on them which I've flitered out but it also weakens Fred's voice which is quite low, in the end it's a compromise between the distarcting wind noise and not making Fred sound too odd. At half term I'm hoping to get a trip up the line to shoot a few last shots to illustrate what Fred is saying and then it is finished. Hopefully my new whizz bang PC will be here by then so I can actually render the project because at the moment it overwhelms my current machine and crashes it so I haven't seen it on disk yet.

'Evie' Roberts and Will Jones

It's been a week for finishing things off as I've also (hopefully) finished the WHR postcard. I finally stopped fiddling with the music at mix 6, I'm pretty happy with the balance and the sounds. Now I need to get Clare Britton and Paul Lewin to say it's ok to go ahead and get 10,000 of them made... gulp. This is why it has to be right.

This is a screen grab of the menu page

 

Also this week the sun came out! Yes! The sun came out! It came out at just the right moment too as it was the morning we were going to get pictures of the shiny new paintwork which Boston Lodge's answer to Michaelangelo, Glenn, has applied to Princess. The loco looked stunning and you can see her in the video I made.

Princess comes out

 

 

 

I've also been  out and about on The Cob recording the comings and goings out there, yesterday I got some nice shots of the man doing the track welding which was quite spectacular. I'll add this footage to whatever I get in the next couple of weeks to make the next progress report... watch this space.