Preparations for Bari video

A few years ago, I wrote The first step in [creating a video] is to convert all the MOV files to WMV format so that Movie Maker can handle them; there is a program which does this painlessly albeit slowly. I'm not sure to which program I was referring but I no longer have such a program. Not only that, the video camera creates MOD files, not MOV, although that point isn't really important.

I tried a few programs on the Internet: one can upload files, have them converted, then download them; this is a painful process and not something that I would like to rely upon. All of the programs that I found that can be installed on one's computer and perform the conversion all have their problems, such as converting only half of each file (the idea is to check out the program then buy it in order to convert the entire file).

All of the programs except for one: eventually I found a program called Handbrake that purports to convert MOD files to WMV, except that it creates files with an M4V extension. I discovered that files with this extension can be loaded into Movie Maker so these converted files are fine. The user interface to Handbrake could be improved no end: it's set up for converting single files. There is a method for converting all the files in a directory but it's far from intuitive. Fortunately someone wrote a tutorial so I was able to convert all the video files with a minimum amount of pain. Actually, that's not totally true: several times the converted output files went into the wrong directory.

I've started work on creating a video: so far I've completed the hotel sequence, where we spent the first two nights. Some of what I filmed didn't turn out well - more pictures of my trouser pocket - but there is enough.