Mum & Dads' 50th Anniversary (2008)

20th September 2008. The year 2008 was interesting. I had been freed from certain obligations, so now with time to pursue my future, options once closed off became available once more. And one of those was videoing and editing. I count 2008 and 2009 as part of my 'Lost Years' because the previous few years took a toll; I took time to get up and running in that department. This 50th wedding anniversary was a one-off family event and it had to be covered. My brother had made most of the arrangements - for which I am eternally grateful - and we paid for our parents to enjoy a break away at the Oxford Belfry just off junction 7of the M40,.
On the day though I was feeling under the weather shall we say (for reason I won't discuss) and left home later than planned. I turned up in time to hear reactions to my parents having arrived for their paid-for break, only to find everyone pop out of nowhere to surprise them! I kissed that moment. Thankfully I got the rest. The latter part of the feature is the following day's nipping into Thame for a look around.
This is a significant video as it was the first to be shot on my new compact Panasonic DV camcorder. Having mislaid my large-scale Sony prosumer SD DV camcorder I'd bought a few years back with a view to possibly doing more weddings and the like, this was an essential buy. Accommodating 3:4 or 16:9, i used it first as a cheap playback camera for importing a pile of pre 'Lost Years' 3:4 DV tapes, before progressing to using it as my main camcorder in 16:9. I don't think I used it the previous year on Izzy's christening, that would be the Mpeg2 camcorder I was looking after for my work boss. It was great being enabled to record in widescreen with my own equipment and helped kick-start my interest in videoing once more.
That expensive prosumer camcorder? It turned up somewhere totally unexpected, having searched the place before, found nothing, and having eliminated that from future searches, it was another two years before stumbling over it! That one had a strange 'stretch' feature, practically a WS picture bunched up into a 3:4 picture. If that was imported into Premiere as I was using (or whatever you use) and stretched out, it was virtually true widescreen. The problem was my poor computer puffed and wheezed as every frame needed re-framing and rendered before anything else was applied - and all that mucking about was not practical at all. Then a complete computer crash meant replacing that and anything created up to that point became a problem moving onto Movie Studio 12, which didn't like Premier's Pro's odd renderings - but that's another story.