Site Docs - RTF 331R - Weird Science

Making the website for the first project hit a high mark for fun. I had shot a couple of video segments, both of plasma arcs in and out of water, for documentation purposes, then checked them on the small LCD display on the camera. When I looked at them on my computer display, however, I discovered all of the formations and motion of the plasma. True justice could have been done by documenting these with a high-speed camera.

I used Adobe Premiere to edit the footage (Is that a valid word with digital files?) to remove the arc-free parts. I played with the scrub tool for several hours watching the formations and listening to the sounds. It reminds me of an active thunderstorm.

I have not used Sony Vegas Video much, but consulting with a friend told me that I could easily zoom into an area of the video, then stretch the video on the time line to create the closeup, quasi-slo-mo on the Photos page of Project 1.

For my second project, I exclusively used the CoffeeCup HTML Editor, which has text-code and visual editors, plus a previewer in the package. As I have mentioned in editions of this page in other ACTLab courses, I tried the visual editor standalone version but found that it recompiles all of the pages in a project for any change at all, destroying any manual code changes. It is either all visual editor or none. Since I have not tried the one in the HTML editor package, I will not comment on it except to say that I am too chicken to try. However, the standalone version has an excellent button-making routine from which I have developed all of the navagation buttons in this site.

As I enter the final project data, I tend to be leaning back toward using the simple text editing capabilities in WinSCP. I like being able to make a minor change, upload it to the server, and verify it on a second machine pointed at the website. CoffeeCup HTML does not use SSH, so I still have to use WinSCP to upload changes. Why use 2 processes?