BlueHeronDruid wrote: 
I'm in like Flynn, eh?

 dmax wrote: 
I would take you with me when I win, but I'm only going to take actual gods, not demigods.

Went to Costco tonight and bought enough sunscreen to last the entire trip. Sorry for the rest of you but I'll take pics of my tan after I get back.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 

Two vacations for the price of one:

Jaco Beach on Costa Rica's Pacific Coast and Casa Metta in Braulio Carrillo National Park on the slopes of an extinct Barva Volcano in the highlands north of San Jose. We loved Cashew Hill this spring, and would love to go back go back again, but this is definitely another exciting opportunity.  L and I are living proof that any Radio Paradise supporter can win. Contibute!

 kysmet wrote: 
In case you don't let me be the second to call "mine".
 

 kysmet wrote: 

very nice! I'm glad Wendy and Erich are still in Costa Rica. I was wondering where they went.

I'm gonna win this time!

 islander wrote: 
I have about come to the same conclusion, but I couldn't pass up Woot's deal on the video cam.  And it's fun to play with, too. Some of the animal clips came out well, with motion and audio, but I agree that stills can give you a quicker overview of the trip.

 BlueHeronDruid wrote: 
It's the off season and I was sending something out. Caught them completely off guard! An RPeep should be on the lookout though.

 islander wrote: 


Edit: What's this about going to the PO? They let you in the door?

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 
What about the still shots?  I like flipping through the photo galleries because you can cover the whole trip faster, and get a broader range of stuff. Plus I can photoshop myself into those a lot more easily.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
The ones from Costa Rica are so full of mistakes, shaky hand, over-zoomed, etc. that they aren't worth spending a lot of time on, but they will make good practice material.  Some of them are OK, but I found that anything with much zoom really needs a tripod. I'll send you a copy anyway, just for giggles.

 BlueHeronDruid wrote: 
That's more what I had in mind. If hobbitt likes it, it has to be worth a try.  There's a lot I still have to learn about videos, but thought I should start looking for tools.

Well there you go. If it's nothing you want to deal with, Justine will give it a shot... send us the files on DVD. I think we have the tools to keep it HD too but we can't burn a blu-ray. If you get a Roku box, some of them have inputs that will take the feed from your camera now and put it on the TeeVee.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 
I use Adobe Premiere Elements. Once I got my crampons on for the learning curve, I was able to do rudimentary editing. hobbitt would have taken the time to learn a lot more. YMMV.

hobbitt uses a free MS product call Windows Live Movie Maker.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 
.mp4 is actually fairly universal, so you should be able to play it through a variety of video softwares.  I've had decent luck lately editing with Avidemux.  It's freeware, and multi-OS.

Oh, and congratulations on the trip!  Couldn't have happened to a nicer couple of folks.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 
Well you know we're macaholics around here... but I'll ask Justine about it.

 Coaxial wrote: 
Thanks. Randy!

And Scott, can you recommend an application for manipulating videos?  Like stitching clips together, or converting the file to some other format?  I can do some of that in the camera, but it's a little (?!) clunky.  It saves in mpeg-4 format that is playable only with Quicktime, which makes playback throgh the camera the only decent way to watch on the big screen.