Now Its All Crystal Clear .....

Forgive the play on words, but our new video enterprise finally has a name - Crystal Clear Video. OK, its not even registered yet and it doesn't have a website, but we are churning through some work, and may even pay for some of the refit to Crystal Blues here in Thailand.

We're recording everything in a very high quality, high definition digital format - our new camera has taken a while to get used to but is proving its worth. We do all the post production, video editing, titling and sound mixing on a Hewlett Packard notebook computer, linked to 4.5TB (terabytes) of online network storage (still working out where I'm going to mount all that when we move back onto the boat). The video files are huge - it takes 30 minutes to simply load a project from one disk to another, across the network.

So far everything has been working smoothly, and we've completed production on 23 of the 25 short video films we recorded in Bali. We've uploaded some of these to the YouTube video service, so now you can see some of the early edits (though at much reduced quality). Thanks to Jon Stonham (whom many of you will know from SV Tui Tai), CEO of Private Homes and Villas, for permission to post these.

My favourite place was Villa Pushpapuri, in Sanur Bali - watch that video here. The very modern villa style can be seen at Villa Asante, close to the famous Echo Beach in Canggu, Bali - watch that video here.

For those interested in the technicalities, the original video was recorded at 1440x1080i PAL format, and the files uploaded to YouTube were 720x576p PAL format. I absolutely promise to film some sailing video as soon as I can, hopefully to make this dry topic a little more interesting to our world of cruising friends. You can also expect some nice images to come out of Borneo this year. We just have to get the boat put back together ....... in the interim we leave Phuket today for two weeks in Koh Samui, filming nine more villas there.