When you go to a church like Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Dayton, Ohio, or St. John's Lutheran Church in Ellisville, Mo., it's easy to get overwhelmed with their video productions. They produce slick, professional, grabbing pieces that wouldn't look out of place on broadcast TV.

Adobe announced Premiere 6.5 yesterday, and it's got just about everything that should have been in 6.0.

R. Collins Farquhar IV, before seeing my new video:

This is a selfish post. I want to record my notes of what I've learned on my current project so I don't forget them, and so I can access them anywhere. Other video hobbyists might benefit.

Something I learned yesterday. And it was entirely a happy accident. But many things that appear to have artistic quality are nothing but happy accidents.

Hi. My name is Dave. I attended the best journalism school there is for broadcasting.

I've been playing around with the public domain films at The Internet Archive. The movies in this collection are generally old industrial films, newsreels, promotional films, and amateur movies, some from as early as 1917. There's a ton of old WWII and Cold War footage. The quality varies, of course, but much of it is very good, and very interesting to an armchair historian like me.

Faced with producing a documentary film, and faced with the increasing prospect of doing it on my own without help from people who know what they're doing, I went on an excursion last night. Well, first I called up a friend to see if she was doing anything. She wasn't home, so I decided to do something useful with my Saturday night: research.

Last night I found myself watching some old documentaries my Dad had on VHS (mostly episodes of old Discovery channel series, circa 1990), as much to watch how they used footage from varying sources and how they handled voiceovers as for the information they were presenting--although the subject matter was something I find interesting. It's much easier to deal with poor quality old footage today than it was then--what I'd try to do is digitize it into Premiere, then export it to a Photoshop filmstrip, then export that into PhotoDeluxe and use its automatic cleanup, then take it back into Photoshop and then back to Premiere. The result wouldn't be perfect but in five minutes you could have a film clip that looks a lot better.

You know it's a different kind of church when you see one making music videos. You're probably not too surprised to hear that's the kind of church I go to. And you're probably not too surprised to hear I'm involved.