After the publication of the Turkey and Jordan video footage, I have started to place the video s made in China online. The video quality is less, the subjects of the video are exciting!

Join me in climbing the Great Wall:

And fly in a balloon

After solving my problems with Adobe Premiere, as I reported last week, I have spent quite some time this weekend sorting and editing the video material I shot in Jordan, last september. The results are twofold. First I made the traditional DVD video, with menu, some photo’s included and music and titles. It has become a 35 minute DVD movie and I am sure that will be too long to show to my friends and family. Next I did some flash movies for the internet, and that is more userfriendly and the quality is quite good (unless you upload to Youtube)

The quality is quite good, considering the not optimal recording I did (no tripod and too much panning). The Canon FS100 is a consumer quality device, with adequate quality, but weak in difficult situations like sunshine with high contrasts, low light giving noise, and to my surprise in high temperature situations loss of autofocus.
Also Adobe Premiere 4 is less stable than version 3. I never saw a crash with version 3, version 4 crashed once in a while. Building menus is also not as integrated in the normal editing, looks like Adobe just threw an external module in. Oh well, it gets the job done and perhaps version 7 will be better.

After doing the DVD video I did several flash movies, shorter, about 4 to 8 minutes, focussed on a restricted number of subjects and placed the result online at 123video.nl.

Here are the first. See the video in full screen, in the player bottom menu there is on the right a [ ] button for that.

Petra Jordan

Jerash, Amman, Dead Sea

Wadi Rum

Damascus

Kings Road, Madaba, Mount Nebo, Kerak

Aqaba

As I am working now on my photos taken in 1975 (and slides dont have eternal life, they are showing a purple detoriation, I am just in time scanning them), I came across this photo.

Thats me in the center taking this slide with my Praktika SLR, my girlfriend watching the crazy Italian yellow taxies driving by.

And again a trip from the past, but with a future inside!

In 1979 we visited Romania, then a heavily communist controlled country. Nice landscape, old churches, home of Dracula (well, we did not went there since Brasov was as far as we traveled from the east), and a short trip by luxury cruiser (with very rude russian crew) to Istanbul in Turkey. And yes, that is where I will be again in june this year!
So have a look at my travel site

In 1977 me and my wife made a grand tour of Greece, the mainland, all the known sites such as Athens, Delphi, Olympia, Meteora. In 1978 we explored the then peacefull and united Yugoslavia.

The slides I made then survived the time. Now I have scanned and enhanced the images and they are worth a look here.

Part of my traveling in China, september 2007, was a balloon trip.

Here you can see a Youtube low quality video of the experience 

With Xvid and Virtualdub I also made a video file in much higher quality (but still lower than the original). Size is 20 Mb so it may take a while on slower connections.

Photo’s of the balloontrip are in the photo web gallery.

The China trip captured in a few highlights:

Shanghai, the Bund in the evening

The Great Wall (and climb!)

Beijing, the Forbidden City

Temple of Heaven Beijing

Terracotta army in Xian

Balloontrip in Yangshou

Victoria Peak, Hongkong

Flying over the Himalaya

I am away now, to China.

The grand old duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half-way up
They were neither up nor down 

Update on september 13th: Hongkong, one more day …

I have uploaded a video clip of my visit to Angel Falls and Canaima, Venezuela, and the watching Dolphins trip, to Youtube.

Have a look here:

The photo gallery is here.

Het is zover, de reis is vastgelegd. 29 augustus vertrek ik met Djoser voor 17 dagen naar China!

Het programma:
Amsterdam - Shanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai, nachttrein naar Beijing
Beijing, Grote Muur en Zomerpaleis
Xian, excursie terracottaleger
Xian, vlucht naar Guilin - Yangshuo
Yangshuo
Yangshuo - Guilin, nachttrein naar Guangzhou
Guangzhou, boot naar Hongkong
Hongkong
Hongkong - Amsterdam