So the state of my week has been… a total pain in my rear. First our VW breaks down in only the way a VW can- expensive and then the muffler on my Versa decided to jump off. This is right after I order both my new video camera AND a new laptop with some of my stock option money from my DayJob, I gave myself a budget! I shopped around and found the best deal on both the laptop, quad core ASUS for just under $450 and a refurbished Canon VIxia HF R200. All told I spent less than half on them than a fancy new DSLR would have cost, mostly because I have been researching these 2 items for months and months. I did have some buyers remorse when the VW broke down. Luckily the rest of my stock option money came through to help with that bill. Then the muffler… Sometimes you just can’t win. Such is life though. I’m happy that I have a great DayJob with benefits like stock options to help me through these tough times.

Anyway, on the positive side of things the new laptop kicks some serious ass. I can process longer videos faster and with color correction and speeding things up. Crunching a 35 minute video of me drawing down to 2 minutes now takes about 20 minutes whereas with my old laptop it took several hours and I couldn’t add any effect or correct for brightness and contrast.

The new camera, well, it also kicks ass. I am able to shoot bright focused videos with only my 2 halogen bulbs lighting my work area, which means i’m not getting blinded. No matter how many lights I had on my old camera just couldn’t shoot anything bright and it would go out of focus a lot. The old camera does okay outside but just didn’t do anything nice inside. So I’m really excited about that. the last camera I bought with a small amount of research this camera I took months to decide on.

Here are some videos shot with the new camera and processed on the old laptop: