Ribbon Skating Montage!

I’d wanted to make a ribbon skating montage for quite some time, but there was always the questions of how many programs would I need and what music to use.  Also this past year between working and spending a few months editing newsvids, I haven’t been making montages, but these past couple weeks I finally settled on music I’d had in mind for a while, got a video of Sasha’s ribbon program and resigned myself to padding the video with clips from the opening of the 2008 Worlds gala as necessary, and edited this one together.  And then couldn’t get it to save except to the huge-ass DV-AVI file with horrendous sound quality; in the end I had to create a smaller avi out of that, reimport it into Windows Movie Maker, replace the sound with the original version of the music, and save it another movie file, which thankfully worked, and so here it is: Ribbon Reel on Ice

This Week in Figure Skating, July 9-15, 2012

July 9-15, 2012

This week’s headlines:

Carolina Kostner to stay

Cynthia Phaneuf injured

Club competitions in Los Angeles, Vail, Milwaukee, & Texas

Multiple skaters announce music

Interviews with Rukavitsin group in Latvia

All That Skate & The Ice head show announcements

Michelle Kwan carried Olympic torch

This Week in Figure Skating, June 11-17, 2012

June 11-17, 2012

This week’s headlines:

ISU Congress announces key decisions

Shilband settles in new rink, two old teams declare for him

Morozov gets back Takahashi, but loses Ando

Medal Winners & Japan Open announce more entries

Samuel Contesti retires

Slovakia announces JGP entries

Shen & Zhao conclude on-ice career

Yu-Na drops lawsuit against professor

A few more music announcements, including one from Pechelat & Bourzat

Skate for Hope held in Columbus

Navka & Kerr carry Olympics torch

This Week in Figure Skating, January 16-22, 2012

I really should’ve done this all last night. But I held out until this morning, hoping to get maybe a little footage of the Canadian free skates, or at least a full list of the 4CC/Junior Worlds team. Though waiting did mean reporting Savchenko & Szolkowy’s withdrawal from Euros, but the only thing that allowed me to finish the editing this morning was expected icy conditions(which didn’t seem to manifest) letting me leave for work and hour and half late, and even then it was still saving(though at least it did so without complications, which really surprised me; I was in such a hurry I almost didn’t try to save to an smaller size and quality sound first), so I could only upload it now. I was dreading it being blocked, but instead it wasn’t claimed at all.

This Week in Figure Skating, November 7-12, 2011

I’m finally finishing at a decent hour again! Though it helped that most of the NHK Trophy was over by the time Saturday morning was. Of course there was a bit of worry when NHK went blocking most of the ladies’ short, but they left more than enough for me to work with.

This Week in Figure Skating, October 3-9, 2011

Assuming I don’t collapse while posting this…

This Week in Figure Skating, September 26-October 2

It seems this is continually thinking up ways to plague me; this week after I’d labored a record ten hours on it, the video of course refused to save normally, and this time the sound merely didn’t get garbled; it outright dropped a couple of times! And coming up this week is the first regional results(I originally included a couple short program results this week, but there simply wasn’t room for them). I was way too tired to post this last night, so posting it now instead:

This Week in Figure Skating, September 12, 2011

Once again the video initially failed to convert, and when I had decided to risk using footage from last night’s Battle of the Blades premiere, and another Yu-Na Kim vid while I was at it. But at least neither got the video blocked, and I can do tags for this during the commercial breaks for Dancing With the Stars.

This Week in Figure Skating, August 22-28, 2011

Another one that wouldn’t convert initially, forcing me to go the long way round and cause sound problems. At least noone blocked it.

This Week in Figure Skating, August 8-14, 2011

One would think that after a hectic weekend of continually watching the Quebec Summer Skate because the Thornhill stream kept having problems, and a video chock full of too many headlines where I nonetheless couldn’t resist the golden opportunity to yell “MAY DAY! MAY DAY!”, it would have been events enough. And when the video wouldn’t save at first, that should have definitely been enough. But then when I saved it to a huge-ass DV-AVI file and attempted to convert a smaller one, it wouldn’t convert. I finally sweated out the ETA on the iPodME steadily going in the wrong direction, freeing up computer memory in a desperate attempt to get it finished before it stalled, and finally had a file YouTube would take. At least it didn’t get blocked anywhere(it’s embarrassing to report on All That Skate without any footage of Yu-Na, but whatever keeps you viewable), but I think the sound problems must be in the DV-AVI creation, and I ended up spending another half hour adding annotations where information had gotten too garbled, panicking when I thought they hadn’t saved, and finally realized I needed to click on the Publish button. So here it is, and I am going to bed.