Roofgardening 2016 - Out on the Tiles

This is true....

Thank you all for your kind words

A quick interlude

There is a saying among the techie fraternity that goes something like... "When your back is against the wall, when you have run out of options, when there is NO other choice... then... read the manual".

The idea being that we often dive in without taking the trouble to work out how to use whatever gadget it is we are currently fiddling with properly , and then wonder why we get frustrated with it.

OK... so... videos. With particular references to Owls.

It takes 25 individual pictures to make every second of animated owls. The process is;
Move Owl(s) - take photograph.
Move Owl(s) - click
Move Owl(s) - click
Move Owl(s) - click
.. and so on. So each second of finished Owl animation takes around 15-20 minutes to photograph. (more, if the Owls are doing something complicated).
It's no great burden; in fact, it's quite fun.

What is NOT so much fun is what happens next. The photographs are imported into the video editing software, at which point they become a series of 5-second-long video clips. Which is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. They need to be 1/25th of a second EACH...not 5 seconds !

So I have to click and drag and curse away making each individual clip just 0.04 seconds long. At which point, I have 25 1-frame-long clips - which is great - each separated by a 0.96 second-long gap - which is NOT great! More clicking and dragging and cursing ensues to join them all together and remove the gaps. And THAT is not easy; one accidental slip with the mouse-hand whilst dragging, and the clips all jumble up.

Oh how those weekends just FLY past !

And then, thismorning at work, I was casually leafing through a book about how to use the video editing software properly . It's a VERY good book... sort of the Video Editors version of Hessayon's "....Expert" series.

And there it was. I read the passage ... and stopped. And went-back and re-read it, and thought "surely not ? "... so I tested it.

The passage described a feature called "Slideshow".. but it may as well have been called "Auto-Owl-Animation", 'cos that is what it does ! All of the clicking and dragging (and especially the cursing) have just gone away; it does it all automatically. What used to take over an hour now takes about a minute !

Be ready to see a LOT more of the owls

But not just yet... I'm going to read some more of the manual. I wonder what else is in there ?

Roofy looks much older than 8yrs 2 weeks old, daitheplant

Hmmm..... one of my tomato plants collapsed yesterday. I think it dried out a little bit, but it has also grown crooked, and is now inherently unstable.

Sooo.... I cut some sturdy canes to size, and attempted to attach them to the plant at key supportive locations.

It was - in truth - a bit more 'faffy' than I anticipated. The nails kept splitting the canes when I hammered them in !

In the end, I had to use Duct Tape and Glue Dots !

Still, its all done now

The mind boggles.

what a great place to garden daitheplant Loved the chickens and the music (couldn't understand a word of it though )
Another good video roofgardener