Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Fish Down!

Last month I may have mentioned that one of The Usual Suspects tripped over a prop and fell while shooting an IPSC stage.



I should mention that this is remarkable because the competitor (Fish) managed to keep his pistol pointed safely downrange and complete the stage with no penalty other than having taken a LOT of time (well, a couple of seconds) in excess of the stage completion time turned in by people who did NOT trip over a spike hammered into the ground. My congratulations to Fish for his superior gun-handling skills.)

I wasn't able to host this scenario over the web, because my available software will not store MPG files, especially those which are more than 1MB in size.

Things have changed!

At great personal expense, I have purchased software * which permits me to created Animated GIF files from the whatever.MPG files which I film with a digital camera during IPSC matches. With due respect for BandWidth, I have carefully chopped it into a sub-1MB file that you can see here.

(It's a lot smaller, faster, and easier to see than the original 2+MB file in whatever.mpg format, because I reduced the image size. Also, I cut out every other frame, so it will appear a little 'choppy'.)

Not everyone wants to see large animated GIFs, so I leave it to your discretion whether you choose to load the animated pictures.

Note that it still requires over 3 minutes to download on a 56kb modem.

Look for more animated GIF files on this website ... as soon as I learn how to make this sucker work!

Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting

[ * NB: For folks who care, the software which I bought to support this option is Corel's Paint Shop Pro 9, which includes a subsidiary application named "Animation 3". This latter software application is the part which actually converts movies to animated GIF files. Maybe someday I'll spend some time learning how to use Paint Shop Pro. In the meantime, "Animation 3" is available from the Corel website for $40 as a stand-along application]

[NB 2: maybe someday I'll learn how to apply Anchors to my blog enries, and I can quit using the cheesy asterisks to refer to notes.]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Since I had the best seat in the house (being the one with timer and the not seen oh sh*& look on my face), I can say The Fish did an excellent job of controlling the handgun on the way down and the way up.