Canon A570 IS movies

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This winter I bought a new digital camera, the Canon A570 IS. It was a great purchase. It was inexpensive, takes excellent pictures, has optical image stabilization, nice manual settings, uses AA batteries, and has very little lag between when you press the shutter button and when it actually takes the picture. It’s movie mode is also great, although it takes MJPEG videos, which are very large. I spent a very long time figuring out the best way to edit the videos and then compress them to some standard format. I chose Cinelerra as my video editor, and Microsoft MPEG4-v2 as my compression codec.

Unfortunately the movies do not load correctly into Cinelerra the way the camera saves them – the audio is messed up. I found I had to run the movies through mencoder using this command before I could open them in Cinelerra:
mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac pcm -o output.avi

When I was done composing my movie in Cinelerra, I export the movie using the “Quicktime for Linux” file format and choose “Uncompressed RGB” from the video setup menu and “Twos Complement” from the audio setup. The movie that gets rendered is huge, but then I compress it with ffmpeg to MPEG4 using this command. The resulting video will play in Windows Media Player. qscale sets the quantization level, and is an alternative to setting a static bitrate:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -f avi -b 2000k -qscale 5 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec mp3 -ar 48000 -ab 128k output.avi

Mad River Glen + Stowe

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Last weekend Dad and I went skiing at Mad River Glen and Stowe. Both resorts had gotten about 3′ of snow the week before, and conditions were awesome!

Mad River Glen, Catamount trail There’s a bunch more snow in the forecast for this week, although I’m unfortunately heading to Vail/Beaver Creek at the end of the week so I won’t be able to enjoy it until I get back.

Dan and Doug at Mad River Glen

Wisconsin skiing

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Yesterday Jerry, Mike, Nathan and I went skiing at Wilmot Mountain, southeast Wisconsin’s world renown ski and snowboard resort. With a 230′ vertical drop, skiers from all over northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin flock to tame its awesome slopes. You could literally be right next to the mountain and not even realize it’s there. Oh, I also forgot to mention that the reason there’s even a hill there at all is because it’s a landfill. We used to go there with middle school ski club, and it was really funny to be back. I wore jeans and a really ugly 80’s jacket and goggles. I used my dad’s old pair of Kastle’s from ~1985. I think they were 210cm.

80's style skiing at Wilmot

I tried to hit some rails with amusing results. We had forward races, backward races, one-foot races, binding wars, and through-the-legs skiing challenges. And we ate fried cheese curds dipped in cheese sauce. And on the way back we hit up the Jew Express:

Jew Express