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Foxvideo Productions



Having spent the best part of 40 years looking through a viewfinder of a stills or video camera, sitting in front of a computer editing photos or videos, producing websites and managing content and social media accounts for organisations or individuals, it’s a very strange feeling to now say “I’m retired".

Despite no longer taking on commercial paid work, it’s virtually impossible to suddenly stop what you’ve been doing for the best part of your working life so, for the past few years I’ve been taking on work on a ‘pro-bono’ basis for church, charity or voluntary organisations. I hope that my experience, skills and equipment can now be put to good use by those who perhaps, don’t have the budget or funding to produce what they want or need for their media requirements.

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Going 'Old Skool'

VHS to Digital setup
I’ve stopped browsing the pro video and audio pages of eBay daily, but I do pop in every other week or so to see what’s around. 2 weeks ago I spotted a Blackmagic Decklink2 PCIe video capture card with a starting price of £10, in it’s day this was a top of the range capture card that sold for around £450+, I won the auction for £19.50.
Decklink2 card
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New Website

Pastoralguide website
It's been a while since I've produced a website from scratch (it's surprising how easily you can forget some of the basics!). This site Pastoralguide.uk was for a regular attendee at my Chapel, Peter Wells. I've been producing his 'Mini Sermons' and 'View from the Pew' videos for over a year now and the obvious progression to promoting them was via a website.
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Affinity Photo - Was OK, now not so sure!

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When Serif released Affinity, it was a game changer, it had all the power (and more) of Adobe Photoshop, was non-subscription and at the time, an offer price of £39.99 so I bought into it.

It soon built up a strong following as an alternative to Photoshop for those not wishing to jump on the subscription model. It was followed by Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, both of which had no interest for me as I only needed a photo editing App.

Affinity v2 is now out, looking to upgrade I looked at the website only to find I needed to shell out £119.99 (upgrade price) for “Creative Collection’ - the full suite of Affinity Apps when I only need the photo App.

I suggest Serif are missing out here, having built up a strong following for Affinity Photo, to then only offer the full suite @ £119.99 (upgrade price), will certainly put people off who don’t require (or can’t afford like me) the “Creative Collection”.

Time to look around for an alternative within my budget now I’m retired!

Update - So Serif came back to me on this, they offer an individual App price of £67.99 for the new version 2, but no upgrade discount on an individual App (so much for trying to retain brand loyalty!)

Postscript.
Looking on Affinity forums, the opinion was that the v2 was probably not worth buying into at the moment. A Black Friday deal for Pixelmator Pro @ £24.99 looked tempting so I bought it. So far I'm very impressed with it and Affinity will be taking a back seat for my photo editing in the future.
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Woodpecker

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Testing out some new MicroSD cards in a GoPro.
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Ride of the Valkyries - Muted!

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I’ve mentioned several times in this and other blog posts about the need to be careful regarding the use of copyrighted music, photos or video in anything posted on Youtube, Facebook or the Internet in general, I now check and double check anything I use and only buy resources from reputable sites that include rights to use……
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BARD vs ChatGPT

On one of my subscribed YouTube channels this morning, there was a new video promoting a change to a subscription model for a company whose plugins I use, the new subscription only model was $14.99 pm or $149 per year for 110 plugins, the perpetual license plugins I’ve bought cost me $29.99 each (£24.53).

These were specialist audio plugins for a specific job in Davinci Resolve, soon after I’d bought them Resolve updated a version to include something similar in the package (!), this particular plugin company did have a few other plugins I might have bought but with the subscription only model, I now won’t bother.

The above prompted me to think about a blog item on Subscription vs Perpetual license, I’m not a fan of the subscription model and try wherever possible to avoid it.

Also in my Inbox that morning was my invite to participate in the Google BARD program, I’d already used ChatGPT and my thoughts turned to asking both BARD and ChatGPT to write the article for me so I could compare them…….
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Calibrite Video Checker

Colour chart
Recently, I posted about using ‘Shot Match’ in Davinci Resolve 18 and how it managed to match the colour on a 2 camera shoot, a cameraman friend of mine read the post and mentioned he’d just bought the Calibrite ColorChecker Passport Video card (£159.59) and he suggested I look at obtaining one.
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Shot Match - Magic!

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Having only recently acquired both my 4K JVC cameras, I’m still getting used to shooting with them. On a recent series of videos for one of the members of my church for his YouTube channel, I’ve tended to stay safe and use ‘auto’ and this has given me very acceptable results as there is minimal editing involved.
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