Another Busy Day for the New Kittens, and Video Editing

Lily and Ruby are getting much bolder and more adventurous with each passing day. They play so vigorously and then quite suddenly get overcome by tiredness and their little heads and eyelids droop, and they drop off into a deep sleep, usually one draped across the top of the other.

Lily seems better today and we think she is managing to pee OK. The vet said to minimise stress and she should settle down quickly and get over her initial mild cystitis. It certainly hasn’t stopped her from being extremely busy and active today with her sister! I did add to her stress briefly though, at lunch time when I was preparing their food, and stepped back onto her tiny paw – what a yell she gave out, and how terribly guilty I felt!! Kitties are so good though, and don’t bear a grudge, and it was soon forgotten (by her, at least!).

They are both eating very well, and drinking plenty of water, too – this is something we’ve never managed to persuade our previous kitties to do. They would all turn their noses up at a dish of water, preferring to drink rainwater and from other sources outside, whose cleanliness could not be guaranteed!

Lily has purred today. They are both sweet little purrers and the sound is quite delicious! Today we have also noticed the emergence of the most attractive little chirrups and squeaks they make when they are excited by their play. They have the sweetest little voices!

Fortunately they seem to be very much together as far as active and sleepy phases go, as they both enjoy playing together, and then sleeping together – they seem to tire at about the same rate. So we aren’t having one clamouring to play, while the other says “Leave me alone! I want to go to sleep!”

After their first night in the TV cabinet, last night they slept in the chair, and have had their daytime sleeps there, too. We bought them a snug little kitten bed with a cowl roof but they haven’t slept in there yet – my hubby suggested putting one of the incontinence pads in there, that we’d put in the cat carrier for their long drive from their previous home, which would have a recognisable smell, but so far all that has achieved is to give them something else to tug at and play with! I think it will end up in shreds all over the floor eventually!

Here’s a video from today, called “Wrestling Match.” Self-explanatory!

Video Editing

I have just acquired a truly brilliant app for the iPad – LumaFusion. As apps go, this was pretty expensive at £19.99 but a comparable video editor for the computer would cost considerably more. I already have Final Cut Pro X on the iMac and the MacBook (doesn’t run on Windows unfortunately) but for some reason this runs very slowly on the MacBook and I don’t want to spend hours sitting at the iMac in the studio as it’s very tiring. Discovering a video editing app for the iPad was great. It doesn’t have all the features of FCP by any means, but it’s pretty impressive.

I also discovered an excellent tutorial course called “The Epic Guide to LumaFusion” in the form of an e-book with video clips, by Eliot Fitzroy. This was a free download and I can’t imagine why because it’s chock full of useful information and a pretty comprehensive guide to the software.

I am gradually familiarising myself with it and producing some reasonable videos now. What’s so brilliant is that the iPad is both video camera and video editor all in one. My normal dedicated video camera will not transfer footage direct to the Mac and I have to download it to the Windows computer via a cable, and then convert the footage to a format FCP will recognise, which adds considerably to the work and the time involved, but with the iPad the footage is already on the device, and anything I want to add in the form of still photos or additional music/sound effects etc., can be acquired wirelessly. The iPad is so portable and easy, and I can work on it anywhere.

LumaFusion is still quite new, and additional features will be added a time goes on. I can’t find a way yet of capturing still images from the video footage or creating rolling titles, but these features could be in the pipeline. The choice of transitions is very limited but since I normally use simple cross-fades and dips (more fancy transitions can easily distract one from the footage itself) this isn’t a problem. Many of the features normally found on high-end video editors are present, such as key-framing, Ken Burns effect, colour correction, multiple video and audio tracks, picture-in-picture, titles, J&L cuts, etc. etc. There is a choice of destinations for sharing completed videos including Youtube, cloud storage and social media.

I am very happy to have discovered all this just in time for capturing the all-too short period of our kittens’ development. They are so much fun, and so desperately cute and adorable that I want to be filming every single moment of the day!!

I have recently bought a bracket to hold the iPad, with a standard tripod screw on it, and I am hoping to be able to rig this up in my studio over my main work area, but I am not sure yet if this will be feasible and how well it would work. If I want to edit the footage in Final Cut Pro, it will be a simple matter to transfer it wirelessly to the iMac.

Technology is definitely moving on!